


Kryptomycota

by flirtygaybrit



Category: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, DC Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alien Biology, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bruce tests the limits on his detective skills/resources/available tech, Canon-Typical Violence, Clark does his best to help out, Illnesses, Kryptonite, Kryptonite used for medical purposes, M/M, Post-Canon, Slow Burn, also alien physiology and immune responses, also there is body horror but it is very mild, technically this is a medical mystery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-22
Updated: 2016-06-22
Packaged: 2018-07-16 15:28:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7273627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flirtygaybrit/pseuds/flirtygaybrit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three men had come running, machine guns in hand, and two of them had disappeared through the adjacent wall before Bruce could even move; the third had raised his gun, and Bruce’s grappling claw had pulled it out of his grasp and sent him reeling. He’d tried to recover and had attempted to throw an uppercut, but Bruce had wrenched his arm hard enough to feel the ligaments snap in his elbow and had slammed his head against the nearest wall.</p><p>By then the screaming had stopped, the dust had started to settle, and Clark stood in the second hole he’d created, the bodies of the men prone and unmoving in the room behind him.</p><p>“You’d better have a good fucking reason —”</p><p>“I need your help,” Clark had said.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kryptomycota

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aeon_entwined](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeon_entwined/gifts).



Stage I: Incubation

“I'm thinking about making some upgrades to the Suit,” Bruce announces.

A strong gust pulls his cape to the side, the winged tips billowing and snapping in the wind while thick snowflakes swirl around him, but he’s not worried about being seen. He’ll hardly be visible from the ground, even against the neon glow of the Gotham Casino sign. The city below is muted by a thick blanket of snow, and this late into the night nobody will want to be caught snooping around Old Gotham, especially in the middle of a blizzard — nobody, it seems, but the three men who lie unconscious in the topmost buckets of the Ferris wheel in the industrial district, and the sole remaining member of an illegal wildlife trade op currently making his escape in a side street behind the Casino. 

His name is Allende, and while it hadn't taken Bruce very long to find him once he’d caught wind of the illegal sale of imported ivory in the city, it _has_ taken him the better part of a week to finally get his hands on the merchandise. It’s taken longer than he would have liked, and now it’s time to tie up loose ends.

The wind gusts again, stronger and colder, though Bruce only feels the chill on the exposed parts of his face. Setting his jaw, he turns his head away, and Alfred crackles to life in his ear. “Did you have anything special in mind this time?”

The hyperspectral imaging built into the cowl shows him that Allende is trying to make a speedy getaway to a small, recently-moored vessel at the North Dock. The water is still mostly open despite the weather, its surface marred by the occasional ice floe; if Bruce had caught on too late, the shipments would have stopped being smuggled in by water, and he would have had to determine the new schedule and drop points. He’s been lucky this time. The goods hadn't even been unloaded when he’d found them, and now the GCPD will be crawling all over the vessel, confiscating its contents and waiting for the man in question to make his escape. Allende, however, won’t make it that far.

“I was curious about the micro plating.” Bruce reaches for the wooden handle of his grappling gun and rubs the pad of his finger over the trigger, then holsters it again. He won’t be going any higher tonight. “And I wonder if we can't find something to replace that gel between the carbon shell and the undersuit.”

He crouches, watching as Allende struggles through the snow; even with the streets empty his escape is slowed down, and Bruce waits until his thermal signature disappears behind the Olympus nightclub to launch himself off the sign. The cape realigns and goes rigid as he drops into a glide and the wind whips at his face, stinging the exposed part of his cheeks even as he decelerates. He lands heavily on one of the stone gargoyles adorning the nightclub, the wind and inertia threatening to carry him into open air.

In his ear, Alfred says, “So you’re not asking about the plating, you want to change the gel?”

“Both,” Bruce says. He steps off the gargoyle and fires the grappling gun at it from below, controlling his descent until he lands silently in the snow atop the nightclub. “Mostly the gel. I want to know what other kinetic dispersion tech Lucius can come up with. Has come up with. Something more flexible, if it’s possible. Something that won't slow me down so much in the winter.”

Alfred makes an amused noise in his ear, and Bruce watches Allende march on toward the old GCR tower. He could glide in over the buildings and dive down from above, maybe try to drop him with a well-placed boot to his lumbar spine. Or hit him with a batarang. Shock him with an electrical charge and watch him convulse in the snow. The visibility is so low that Bruce won’t even need his usual tricks to disorient him. 

“Ah. Not so fond of what winter does to the aging, are we?”

“I told you you're free to test the suit out if you think it'll keep you young.” Alfred chuckles, and Bruce continues, “But stiff joints are one thing, Alfred. Enough time out here rozen damping gel, on the other hand, means a slower reaction time, which might make a hell of a difference against ballistic —”

“Yes, yes, I know you would never want to place yourself in harm’s way,” Alfred replies drily. “You’ve never had trouble with the gel slowing you down before. What's different now?”

Now Bruce aims the grappling gun again and fires it at the uppermost platform of the communications tower; he pulls himself up over the edge, holsters the gun, and leans against the protesting metal railing. Now the smuggler is directly in front of him, and Bruce retracts the lenses on the cowl; the cold air makes his eyes water, and his visibility is no better. Without any sort of infrared, Bruce can hardly see the man through the snow; from this distance, Allende is little more than a dark blur on a dark background. Bruce could walk up behind him and take him down without anybody ever hearing a peep.

“Just humour me, Alfred,” he says lightly. “It’s almost Christmas, isn't it? I know we agreed on no early gifts, but for amusement’s sake.”

Alfred makes a disapproving sound. He knows better than most that Bruce tends to have more on his mind than he lets on. Not that it ever stops him from prying. It certainly doesn’t inspire Bruce to elaborate. “Well, I don't like to repeat gossip, but I have heard a whisper or two about ongoing research involving liquid body armour. Metallic nanoparticles that make use of magnetic fields, which means you're a step in the right direction already. It’s lightweight, flexible, and extremely good at providing protection.” He pauses for dramatic effect. “I can’t imagine you’ll be interested at all.”

“Funny. Liquid armour, you said? Like a skin suit?”

“You wouldn't even need the bat motif to terrify the good citizens, with a costume like that,” Alfred says jovially. He’s in a good mood, that much is obvious. Bruce thinks it’s a good thing. Conversation is usually kept to a minimum when the streets are more crowded, but since the blizzard has all but ground the city to a halt, Alfred can have his fun. God knows he doesn't get enough of it. Besides, on slow nights like tonight, Bruce doesn’t really mind the companionship.

“No, I certainly wouldn't.” He takes a deep breath, the cold air stinging his throat as he pulls it into his lungs. The frigid wind doesn't penetrate the titanium and carbon fiber of his cowl and Suit, but the chill in Gotham runs bone-deep at night even without the wind. Dawn is hours away yet. “I think it’s time to turn in, Alfred. I'll talk to our friend, leave him with the GCPD. Don't wait up.”

“What, and miss your gentle interrogation? Ha. This is better than going to the cinema.” 

Bruce chuckles to himself. Sometimes he can't help but think that Alfred enjoys living through him on these missions, as much as he claims to disapprove of the turn Bruce’s tactics have taken over the years. That aside, seeing through the eyes of the Bat must be thrilling even from the comfort of an ergonomic chair. “Well, I'll try not to disappoint. Any requests?”

“A triple pirouette, if you’re flexible enough —”

Bruce can hear the crash loud and clear over the commlink, and although Bruce doesn't take his eyes off of Allende, he strains to listen to the warning alarm in his earpiece, the siren barely audible over the howling wind. He knows what the siren means — it's the sound of an intruder. “Alfred, what was that?”

“It appears to be…” Silence while Alfred checks the cameras, and then: “Ah, a special friend of yours.” 

The siren stops and Bruce grits his teeth. Alfred seems to think he has a lot of friends; these days, all he has are a lot of annoyances, none of whom seem to understand the point of privacy. “Tell my friend to go somewhere else.”

Another crash, glass shattering, and this time Alfred's voice seems to has lost its pleasant tone. “I'm not sure he’ll listen to me. He’s just flown into a workstation, I'm just going to —”

Now Bruce can hear the clatter of metal on the floor, and he has to remind himself to unclench just about every muscle in his body. “Just… keep him busy until I get there. I'll try to hurry.”

“Try not to get lost in the snow, sir,” Alfred replies. 

The cape snaps out again as Bruce leaps into the open air. Disgruntled at the prospect of having to go home and yell at a literal alien invader, he doesn't even bother toying with Allende; he fires the remote claw at the man’s back mid-glide, retracting the line to accelerate himself forward while pulling Allende back toward him. Bruce slams into him at the knees, inertia carrying them both forward several extra feet. Allende lands face-first in the snow, howling in pain. Bruce rolls more gracefully, snow sliding off of his cape as he steps forward.

“Let’s talk about that cargo,” Bruce says, and slams his boot down. 

 

The blizzard hardly slows Bruce down on his way back to the Cave, and when he finally skids to a halt on the runway, the doors rising on the Batmobile to reveal the damage, he can already feel his blood pressure rising.

Two of the glass panes on the upper level have been shattered completely, broken glass and half-repaired gadgets scattered among the remains of the workbench that had been suspended from the ceiling next to it. The Computer is untouched, luckily, but his chair has been upended next to it, and when Bruce turns to look out over the rest of the Cave he can see one of the alternate exits appears to have been forced open from the outside, the metal doors bent and warped inwards like aluminum foil, creating a yawning hole that will take Bruce more time than he can afford to fix.

Bruce thinks his new anti-brutality policy may need to be put on hold until the morning.

He finds Alfred in the medbay upstairs with the lights turned low, and with him is Clark, comfortably sprawled out in a reclining chair in the center of the room wearing a hoodie and sweatpants that don't belong to him. Behind him, Clark’s Kryptonian armour is laid out on a table, next to a blood pressure cuff and a sphygmomanometer. Alfred must be feeling generous tonight to pamper him like this.

Clark raises a hand in greeting as Bruce strides in. The other remains stuffed in the pouch in the front of his sweater, an apologetic look softening his features that does nothing to soothe Bruce’s instinct to politely sink his fist into it.

He forces himself to take a breath. He likes Clark, but he doesn’t like home invasions. Once was enough for him. “What the hell happened here?”

“I believe that is a question best left for Master Kent to answer,” Alfred says. Bruce almost thinks he sees Alfred try to hide a smile as he excuses himself from the room. Then it’s just him and Clark, and Clark doesn’t look eager to explain himself.

“Nice clothes,” Bruce says, to get the obvious out of the way. “Your other ones burn up on reentry?”

“Bruce,” Clark says softly, then seems to think better of arguing. “I know this looks bad.”

Bruce glowers. He’d left the cowl and gauntlets on the table outside, which means his hair is likely plastered to his head and his glare is now at least twice as effective as it would've been behind the lenses, even with Clark’s ability to see through them. Glowering, as he's been told, is an extremely effective look on him, eyeliner and all.

Now Clark’s sheepish smile starts to waver. Bruce would be angrier if Clark didn’t look so uncomfortable, and to be fair, he’d been more lenient the first time this had happened. He likes Clark. He has to remind himself of that.

“You broke into my house,” Bruce says stiffly. “And you broke my equipment. _And_ you interrupted my mission.”

“I’m sorry,” Clark says. He stuffs his other hand in his pouch, as if sheepishness is apology enough for the repairs Bruce will have to make. He gestures toward the rock ceiling beyond the door. “I tried to, um... I tried to fly in, but it was hard to control and I kept hitting the… I mean, it’s kind of a long story, but I think I’m...”

His gaze slips away from Bruce's face, traveling slowly down over the broad symbol on his chest and finally locking onto the utility belt at his waist. Bruce frowns. Clark's eyes are normally bright and sharp, too blue and too attentive for their own good even when he claims to have all of that fancy shit shut off. Now they seem darker and unfocused, his pupils wide and fixated on some unspecified part of the Suit, as if he's looking through Bruce without really seeing him. 

The thought makes Bruce's skin prickle, but at the same time he’s intrigued. He’s only ever seen Clark off his game a few times since the incident that had shaken the Warehouse District the year before, and even then Clark has still managed to look guarded and stiff, wary of the people around him.

Curious, Bruce raises a hand and snaps his fingers. He notes that it takes Clark a split second longer to find the source of the noise, but Clark doesn't appear at all bothered by it. 

“I have something for you,” Clark says once he manages to catch Bruce’s gaze. At this point, Bruce can’t even hold a proper scowl.

“That why you broke in?”

“That was an accident,” Clark argues. He tries to wiggle into a more upright position, then pauses, blinking at the centre of Bruce's abdomen. “I didn't try to break in. Your front door was locked. And your back door. And your other back door. Alfred was here, you know, it’s not like there was nobody home.”

Bruce takes a careful seat next to him and rubs his temple. It’s mostly out of habit, but he has a feeling that he’ll end up with a headache long before he sorts this mess out. “So you crash-landed in my lab to show me something. Why not just find me outside? You knew I was out.”

“I was, um… I’m not really, you know, I can’t...” 

“He’s been a bit off-balance,” Alfred calls helpfully from outside the room. Clark shifts slightly in the chair, pulling his knees up to his chest, and Bruce notices for the first time that he's barefoot. Apparently aliens don't need socks in the winter. Or their own personal clothing.

“Off-balance,” Bruce repeats, turning his attention back to Clark. “What does that mean?”

“Dizzy,” Clark says. “I guess that’s how you’d describe… like the way I used to get dizzy when I was a kid? My senses are all out of focus.”

It doesn't sound much like the dizziness Bruce is used to, but he’s not exactly dealing with a normal person. At least now they're getting somewhere. “Out of focus in what way? Are you sensitive to light? Everything sound a little too loud?”

Clark nods slowly. “Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes it’s too loud, sometimes there’s just… too many noises. Same with this,” he says, gesturing to his eyes. “I can see too much and too little, but never just enough. I can't really control it. Like now, I can see you, but I can't make myself focus on what you _look_ like. I can see your face, your skull, your brain… lungs...”

He trails off, gaze dropping down somewhere below the right side of Bruce's ribs. When it becomes apparent that Clark isn't going to finish the thought, Bruce scrubs his face with one hand. At least Clark has enough common sense to say nothing if he has nothing nice to say.

“Well, it sounds like a migraine,” Bruce says at last. He stands and moves toward the table that Clark’s uniform is on, searching the drawers beneath until he finds a flashlight. “Or some kind of Kryptonian version of one. Mind if I shine this in your eyes?”

“If you think it’ll help,” Clark shrugs. He inhales sharply when the light hits his pupil, yet instead of constricting it flashes red, wavering slightly as Clark tries to keep his gaze fixed on the light. 

“Huh,” Bruce says, moving the light to Clark’s other eye. He’s never noticed Clark’s eyes doing anything special in the past, but he also doesn't tend to look Clark directly in the eyes at all, if possible. “Your eyes do that before, or are you doing that on purpose?”

“I... don't know,” Clark says, furrowing his brows. “What are they doing?”

Bruce holds his flashlight further away. He’s reminded of an animal at night, yet the image of a deer in the headlights doesn't quite seem to fit. Clark is graceful enough, sure, but he knows better than to run headlong into something bigger, faster, deadlier… well. Usually. “Refracting, it looks like,” he says. “Follow the light.”

Clark does so, pupils glinting red again as he follows Bruce’s hand. Bruce hasn't experienced Clark’s heat vision up close and personal, but he always sort of imagined it would look like this, and the thought of it is enough to set him on edge. 

“Mm, I don't think it’s a concussion,” Bruce says slowly, clicking the light off. The red in Clark’s pupils disappears immediately. No change in pupil size, no difference side to side. “Not that I think you could get a concussion. It just looks like you got a little too high and don't want your mother to find out.”

Bruce lowers himself back into his chair. He can hear the faint sounds of Alfred picking up the broken bits and pieces out in the lab, and he taps the flashlight against his palm, irritated all over again. He could’ve spent all night with Allende. It would’ve been preferable to coming back to a broken lab and a Kryptonian headache.

After a moment, Clark clears his throat. “I was just thinking… maybe it has something to do with this, I picked it up earlier…”

Bruce looks up as Clark holds out a hand, palm-up, and uncurls his fingers to reveal a luminescent red rock the size of a marble.

That changes everything.

“You're fucking kidding,” Bruce says. He would know that glow anywhere. “That’s kryptonite, isn't it? You touched kryptonite and now you're here pretending you don't know why your body’s not working —”

He takes the rock from Clark’s hand and inspects it, turning it in his palm to find it open on one side, the inside crystalline and glittering, a crimson alien geode. Bruce tightens his fingers around it, then runs his other hand through his hair, forcing himself to take a steadying breath. “Okay. So that’s one mystery solved. Now why the fuck did you bring it to me?”

“I trust you with it more than I trust the government,” Clark admits. 

“What, letting me get my hands on kryptonite once wasn’t enough for you?” Bruce asks. Whatever sort of kryptonite this is must have scrambled Clark’s neural activity. He didn’t think Clark would ever trust him with something like this again. In Clark’s place, he wouldn’t trust himself.

Clark watches him, frowning slightly. “You know what they would use it for, Bruce. Don’t pretend this is the last straw. You were trying to help me a minute ago.”

“A minute ago I didn't know you were under the influence. Christ.” Bruce pushes himself up and walks to the door, kryptonite still clenched in his hand. Months ago, he would've been tempted to shove a piece of kryptonite this size down Clark's throat and watch him choke on it. Now, however, he just wants to put it out of sight and out of mind. Move on with his life. He’d been doing just fine with that. Clark had too.

He watches Alfred picking up broken pieces of metal from the doorway. To break a pane and suspended table like that would have been relatively simple for a man of Clark’s size and strength, but the alternate Cave entrance would have taken more force to break through. Clark must have wanted to deliver the damned thing pretty badly, and if he’s as frazzled as he claims to be, Bruce imagines it must have taken as much coordination as Clark could muster. 

“I wanted to get it to you before anybody else could get their hands on it,” Clark says quietly. “I knew you’d know what to do with it.”

Bruce sighs. As much as he hates to admit it, he and Clark are in a similar position with few friends to rely on. The government has fucked them both over multiple times now, Diana has enough problems of her own to deal with, now that trying to recruit the other people in Luthor’s files has become top priority, and it’s unlikely that Clark would ever burden Lois or his mother with such a thing. If anything, Bruce knows how important it is to have at least one person to count on.

After several long moments of particularly contemplative silence, he turns back to Clark. “I’m glad you brought it here. I’ll find a place for it. How does it affect you, by proximity? Can you walk?”

“Uh…” Clark swings his legs over the edge of the seat. He braces himself as he stands, fingers digging into the arm of the chair, and Bruce can see even in the dark that he’s struggling to stay upright. With effects like that, it’s got to be kryptonite. “I think so, yeah.”

He takes a tentative step forward, sways, steadies himself with the chair, and steps forward again. “The floor feels like it's moving,” he says. He rises several centimeters into the air and drifts slowly forward, brows furrowed in concentration, but even his flight is obviously unstable.

“Maybe you should just sit down for a minute,” Bruce says. Clark is starting to drift off to the left, and Bruce doesn't want to see anything else broken tonight, if it can be helped. “Just take it easy.”

“I tried that,” Clark says stubbornly. He stops in mid-air, bobbing inches above the ground, and rubs at his eyes. “It didn't help. I'll probably be fine by the time I get home.”

“Where's home now?” Bruce asks. Clark hasn’t been living in Metropolis since his return, and he hasn’t made any sort of effort to reveal to the world that he’s come back. Bruce respects the need for privacy after something like that. He hasn’t bothered to ask until now where Clark hangs his cape, content just to know that Clark is staying somewhere safe.

He watches Clark float forward another few feet; this time Clark tracks so far to the side that he bumps gently against the wall, and drops back into the ground with a frustrated sigh. 

“Kansas,” he says after a moment. “It’s not like the Planet is going to take me back after all this time.”

Bruce snorts before he can help himself, then steps forward, empty hand outstretched. “You won't make it to Kansas like this. Come on.”

“I made it here,” Clark argues. He’s leaning against the wall now, defensive. “I flew in from Minnesota.”

“Jesus.” Bruce wonders how many times Clark had crash-landed on the way over, and whether the craters are in a straight line. He’s seen the sort of damage that Clark is capable of creating, however unintentional. “Do you at least want… I can take you back in the Batwing, if you just want to rest for a little while.”

Now Clark floats up again, floating gently toward the door with one hand braced against the wall. “Thanks, Bruce. It’s fine. I'll get out of your way so you can go back to… whatever I interrupted.”

Bruce steps aside to let Clark pass by. “You really think you're up for a trip like that right now?”

“I'll be fine,” Clark assures him. He bumps into the door frame and pauses to right himself, and Bruce watches him with a raised brow. The kid may be infuriatingly stubborn, but at least he's dedicated. 

“If that’s what you want. By the way, you're forgetting something,” Bruce says. Clark looks at him, questioning, and Bruce tilts his head in the direction of the back table.

Clark squints at his uniform, and Bruce tucks the kryptonite into one of the front pouches of his belt before holding out his hand again. He understands wanting to crawl away to lick fresh wounds, but this is just pathetic. “Come on. You can stay here for the night. Alfred and I will keep an eye on you, make sure things don't get too out of hand.”

Slowly, Clark lowers himself down. He stands, weaving slightly as he looks at Bruce, and then grabs Bruce's forearm to take another step forward. 

“You don't have to help,” he mumbles. Bruce pulls Clark's arm around his shoulders and curls his own around Clark's waist, and Clark leans against him tentatively, letting Bruce take more of his weight once he’s satisfied that they're not going to collapse.

Bruce leads him toward the stairs. He has a guest bedroom that Clark can sleep in until his head is clear. The hardest part will be getting him there, and then Bruce can spend the rest of the night deciding what to do with Clark’s little gift. “You didn't have to bring that kryptonite to me, but you did.”

“I don't have many other friends,” Clark admits. He smiles faintly, and Bruce chuckles, tightening his hold on Clark's side as Clark leans into him. 

“Yeah, I know the feeling.”

Stage II: Prodromal

He can see the pipe in his peripheral view before it ever lands, a vicious swing from behind that would knock unconscious any man — at least, it would drop any man without a titanium helmet. There’s a knife coming at him from the front, a serrated, lethal-looking thing held by a man in a bomber jacket, but dodging it would mean jumping back into the arms of the man with the pipe. Bruce twists, grabbing the pipe firmly with both hands, and lets his muscles uncoil; the combined momentum of his body and the man’s swing pulls the pipe straight out of the man’s hand and into the side of Bomber Jacket’s head; the man drops, knife clattering to the ground, and Bruce stabs backward, hitting the Plumber square in the solar plexus with the opposite end of the pipe. Now Plumber drops to his knees, all the air driven from his lungs, and Bruce backhands him with enough force to send his body sliding to the feet of the last man left standing.

He hadn’t planned to get into a fight tonight. This was meant to be a stakeout, not a street brawl. For weeks Bruce has been tracking the movement of a drug trafficking ring: high-quality China White, the sort of purity and price range that makes good men go bad and turns bad men into monsters. It’s not the distributors that he wants, though. Street dealers are obvious targets, irritatingly numerous but easy enough to scare off. He’s interested in finding out where the drugs are being manufactured. It’s simple enough to trace imported goods back to a single source, but this particular substance seems to lead only to dead ends, rather than a workshop. 

What makes it especially irritating is that criminals really seem to enjoy making up silly names for themselves, and it tends to be a hell of a lot harder to trace names like ‘The Judge’ without interrogating half a dozen street thugs and a self-proclaimed businessman or two. At least there’s no Jury or Executioner this time. It’s a small blessing.

It had been a simple enough plan of action: thirteen men spread throughout an old warehouse, twelve of whom would be picked off one-by-one, disappearing silently and efficiently into the shadows. Bruce has it on good authority that one of the men, a broad-shouldered, tattooed, walking stereotype of a thug that goes by Chandler, may be able to offer more information on The Judge’s whereabouts.

He’d managed to take down one thug before the brick wall had exploded next to him, and that had gotten everybody’s attention just nicely. Three men had come running, machine guns in hand, and two of them had disappeared through the adjacent wall before Bruce could even move; the third had raised his gun, and Bruce’s grappling claw had pulled it out of his grasp and sent him reeling off-balance. He’d tried to recover and had attempted to throw an uppercut, but Bruce had wrenched his arm hard enough to feel the ligaments snap in his elbow and had slammed his head against the nearest wall.

By then the screaming had stopped, the dust had started to settle, and Clark stood in the second hole he’d created, the bodies of the men prone and unmoving in the room behind him.

“You’d better have a good fucking reason —”

“I need your help,” Clark had said. 

Bruce had opened his mouth, teeth bared in a snarl, and shut it again at the sound of approaching footsteps; infrared had revealed to him him half a dozen men coming in from two separate hallways, several armed with a variety of non-lethal weapons: knives, pipes, brass knuckles. He’d looked back at Clark, rolled his shoulders, and adjusted his gauntlets.

“I’ve got them,” he told Clark. “You get the rest. Leave the big one.”

Clark nodded and was gone again before Bruce could blink, dust swirling up in his wake.

He’d watched the men file into the room from above. With no rafters, he’d made do with a hole in the ceiling, and had dropped onto one man’s shoulders, sending him pitching forward; Bruce used the inertia from the fall to roll them into the ground, and had sent the man flying towards another, who went stumbling back through the hole that Clark had made in the outer wall. A heavy chunk of concrete had come flying at him from the side, and Bruce had caught it in mid-air, grunting as he flung it back in the direction it had come from. He wouldn’t have seen through the dust without thermographic imaging, but with a heat signature he could see it catch the man in the stomach and topple him to the ground.

When Bruce spun around again, a man in a bomber jacket had brandished a knife at him, and Bruce had grinned.

 

Clark drops Chandler at his feet. Bruised and bloodied and hardly able to stand, Chandler snarls up at Bruce, as threatening as a kitten. Calmly, Bruce places a boot on his chest.

“Give me a second,” Bruce says, then looks at Clark. “I told you to leave him alone.”

He flips up his lenses in time to see Clark’s mouth press into a thin line. More alarmingly, he notices that Clark’s pupils are red again, reflecting the dim light down the hallway. “He wouldn’t come quietly. Get what you need and come with me.”

On the ground, Chandler makes a grab for Bruce’s legs, trying to pull his knees out from under him. Both Bruce and Clark glance down, and Bruce unholsters his grappling gun; the hook wraps around Chandler’s wrist, and the rope begins to recoil rapidly, pulling his arm out of its socket with a snap. Normally, Bruce prefers to tease a bit more information out before this stage, but he seems to be on a time crunch. Bruce doesn’t like deadlines.

“Wait outside,” Bruce says, flipping his thermal vision back on. Clark lingers for a moment, his body a vibrant splash of white in Bruce’s lenses, brighter even than the red-orange bodies scattered around them. “I’d like some privacy.”

Seemingly unbothered by Chandler howling and frothing at the mouth beneath Bruce’s boot, Clark nods, cape billowing in the warm summer breeze as he steps through the hole in the brick.

 

“Your body temperature is nearly four hundred degrees,” Bruce observes. He catches Alfred’s gaze and then looks at Clark; atop a cycle ergometer in only a pair of athletic shorts, covered in wires and tubing and adhesive electrodes and a respiratory mask attached to a machine monitoring the exchange of gas in his lungs, Clark looks as if he’s about to participate in a medical experiment. For all intents and purposes, that’s exactly what Bruce is trying to do. “We can’t even see that kind of reading with regular thermography. And your respiratory exchange is higher than humanly possible. Any normal person should be dead, with readings like these.”

Clark makes a low sound and pulls the respiratory mask from his head; the inside of the mask, his mouthpiece, and the tube below the mouthpiece filter are all crusted with ice. With any human subject they would be full of condensation, but Clark had exhaled carbon dioxide at such high levels and with such force that any remaining gas had been crystallized immediately. He’s burning up on the inside, but breathing ice on the outside. “I don’t get it. I don’t feel any worse.”

Bruce sits back in his chair and rubs his mouth slowly. He’d felt Clark’s skin earlier and hadn’t been surprised to find him warm to the touch, given that he’d been white-hot in Bruce’s vision, a temperature that Bruce is sure the cowl hasn’t even registered in a living creature before. His symptoms, if any, seem to be no worse than what Bruce is used to seeing in people with mild fevers, and yet Bruce can still see the evidence suggesting otherwise: his thermogram displayed on a separate monitor. Standing next to him for comparison, Alfred is a soft blend of red and orange and yellow, but Clark’s heat signature is a vibrant blue, a full-body beacon of colour.

Some time between leaving the warehouse and arriving at the Cave, Clark’s eyes had returned to their usual colour, but even as Clark turns to look at him Bruce can see the light catch, pupils flashing before turning black again.

“It’s been… what, five months now?” Clark continues. “I was fine for a few days after my senses started normally working again, I don’t know how or when this happened —”

They’ve only met a handful of times since Clark had delivered the red kryptonite in the winter, once to check on Clark’s condition, once when Diana had returned to report on the Atlantean King’s stubbornness, then occasionally in the field for brief collaborations. Bruce has made a conscious effort to be nicer to him since then, even when he’d had to make repairs to the Cave. It’s no longer a matter of keeping enemies close, but instead a matter of strengthening available friendships and alliances. All things considered, when Clark can stand on his own two feet and use a door properly, his company is actually quite pleasant.

“Heat vision,” Bruce interrupts. “Your eyes, the lasers. Have they been acting up?”

Clark shakes his head. For a man with a body temperature well over the boiling point of water, he hasn’t even broken a sweat. Then again, he would’ve easily broken the stationary cycle if he’d attempted to work at a pace Bruce would like to observe, so they’ve had to make do with monitoring a steady, moderate-intensity, long-duration workload. Not that it’s helped. “I haven’t used them in a while. Haven’t had to.”

Alfred helps remove the electrodes, untangling the wiring that’s been monitoring Clark’s physiological processes. It’s all useless data, given that neither Bruce, Alfred, nor any other living man have any other information to compare Clark’s superhuman physiology to. If there were any ideal Kryptonian baseline to compare it to, it would need to be Clark’s own. “Are you suggesting that it may be a buildup of heat energy? An excess of sun radiation and no outlet for it, leading to some sort of… over-dramatic multi-system inflammatory response?”

“I don’t know,” Bruce sighs. He’d considered it briefly, but if the reason for his body temperature is overexposure to the sun leading a buildup of heat, this is something that shouldn’t be new to Clark. The kid had grown up in _Kansas_. “What do you think?”

“I don’t think that’s it,” Clark replies. He climbs off of the cycle and looks at the monitor displaying his respiratory exchange data, though Bruce doubts he knows what the graphs mean. Bruce hardly understands it himself. He certainly doesn’t know what to do with readings like these. “I grew up in Kansas. I lived in the sun. It doesn’t make me any hotter, it just makes me…”

“Stronger,” Bruce finishes. Engrossed in reading his carbon dioxide expenditures, Clark misses the wry half-smile that Bruce shoots him.

Alfred sets about cleaning up some of the equipment while Clark leans against the table that Bruce is seated at, arms crossed over his bare chest. Bruce leans back in his chair and looks up at him, thoughtful. “You suppose it’s related to the kryptonite again?”

“Maybe,” Clark says quietly. “I haven’t been around it for months now… not since I brought that sample to you.”

“Longer-lasting effects?” Bruce guesses. “The green wore off pretty quickly, but how long did it take for you to go back to normal after the exposure to this new strain?”

“Just a few days,” Clark says. He pulls another chair closer and sits on it, resting his elbows on the table and staring at the water falling outside the window on the opposite side of the lab. “But even since then I haven’t really felt like things have gone back to normal… not completely.”

Bruce angles himself toward Clark. With his shoulders hunched over and that ridiculous suit out of sight, it’s almost easy to forget that Clark is something greater than human. “You’ve never been normal. Even before you brought that kryptonite, you were different.” 

“Don’t I know it,” Clark murmurs. He still doesn’t talk much about what had happened the previous year, and Bruce doesn’t blame him. They don’t need to drag the past along with them anymore. Bruce has already proven that it does more harm than good.

Bruce looks around the room. With all of his lab equipment, his computers, gadgets, and tools turning up data that’s useless without something to compare it to, it almost seems like they’ve exhausted all of their options. He watches as Clark sighs, letting his head fall to his forearms, and suddenly remembers that he’s got at least one more tool in his belt, one that he’d overlooked completely in his rush to come up with a diagnosis. 

“Clark.” This time, when Clark looks up at him, he doesn’t say anything. Bruce has only ever seen fear in Clark’s eyes in brief flashes, but he’s never seen Clark look so overwhelmingly defeated. “How do you feel?”

“That’s kind of a weird question.”

“Try telling my therapist that,” Bruce replies. “Just humour me. Tell me how you feel.”

Clark looks thoughtful for a moment, then: “It’s strange, you know. Sometimes I feel like I’m not myself. It sounds pretty… out there, I know, but… sometimes, when I’m tired or when I’m sitting around at night, it feels like I’m not in control. I know I am, it’s my body, but every so often it feels like...” he pauses, and Bruce tilts his head, inviting him to continue speaking. Clark frowns slightly, then continues, “Sometimes it feels like I’m not the one using my body.”

He looks up at Bruce, eyebrows raised. “Do I sound crazy?”

Bruce chuckles, though there’s no humour in it. He wants to mull over Clark’s response on his own, try to sift through the data he has and see if things don’t start to fall into place. A comforting word, however, doesn’t tend to maintain its effectiveness if you just sit on it. “Honestly? You sound just as fucked up as I am.”

Clark offers a small smile, pupils flashing again as they catch the light. “Thanks, Bruce.”

 

Bruce wakes before dawn, and he knows immediately that he isn't alone.

He turns onto his side slowly, bracing himself for an intruder or worse, and finds something even more startling: several feet higher than any man should stand are two red points of light, like dying embers glowing in the dark.

“Clark,” he says, rubbing his eyes to clear his vision. “I thought you were staying in the lab.” He’d left Clark in the medbay with a pillow and an apology for not having something more comfortable to sleep on than a cot, and had promised to return in the morning to take a look at Clark’s vitals and analyze any new findings.

Clark had promised not to disturb the machinery, and now Clark floats in front of him, unmoving, arms at his sides, pupils wide and luminescent. There’s no light for them to reflect back this deep in the night, not even from a digital clock display. This time, the light seems to be coming from within, heating the air in the room like a fire.

Bruce sits up slowly. “Is everything alright?”

“You said to find you if things got worse,” Clark says quietly. He moves toward the bed, maybe a foot, and then stops, still hovering near the ceiling.

Bruce blinks at him. He can't make out Clark's expression even with the glow from his eyes, but he knows that something isn't right. The hair on the backs of his arms is standing on end despite the heat, and Bruce has never been one to disregard his instincts. “Okay… give me a second, just let me get dressed and we’ll figure out —”

Clark is on him before he can react, hands curled around his wrists and his knees digging into Bruce’s ribs, locking him in place like a rabbit between a fox’s jaws. Bruce stares up at him, his upper body immobile despite his best efforts to strain against Clark's hold; he can feel his heart pounding as Clark leans down, eyes shining just above Bruce's face. Up close he can make out the details of Clark's face, and he doesn’t need a light to know that he doesn’t like what he sees. He knows a predator when he sees one. Hell, that’s his thing.

“Hey,” Bruce breathes. He lets himself go limp, hands opening slowly in a gesture of submission. He’s fought with Clark before, and he’s seen how things usually end for people who try to fight back. “Easy, Clark. Listen to me, you're safe, do you hear me? Understand what I'm saying?”

A beat, then: “Yes.”

Bruce almost sighs in relief. Clark hasn't eased up yet, but as long as Bruce can reach him, he thinks he has a chance to deescalate the situation. “Clark, I need you to listen closely. You have to let me go. I can't help you here. We can go to the Cave and see what’s wrong but you have to let me go.”

Slowly, Clark's fingers begin to uncurl, but Bruce’s sense of self-preservation keeps him still, cautious. He watches Clark's eyes, the red finally disappearing briefly beneath Clark’s eyelids as he blinks. At last, it fades altogether, and Clark releases his hands and sits back on his knees, flinching away as if Bruce’s skin has burned him.

Then, as suddenly as he'd appeared, Clark is gone. Bruce hears the faint sound of his front door slamming shut, then the unmistakable crack of a sonic boom echoing across the lake. 

Bruce reaches for his phone. 

 

He’s in a meeting with the head of the Thomas Wayne Foundation when Alfred calls to tell him that Clark has returned. With a few hasty excuses and apologies offered, along with a promise to negotiate a shift in funding for the Foundation and the Research Institute, Bruce manages to make it back to the Cave within the hour. 

Clark is hooked up to the Computer again when Bruce sees him. He looks up briefly as Bruce enters the room but doesn't quite meet his eyes.

“Alfred, can you give us a minute?” Bruce asks quietly. He waits until the elevator door closes, signalling that Alfred has left the Cave completely, to sit next to Clark, and for a moment neither of them speak. Bruce has never actually had to ask somebody why they'd been standing over him in the night. Usually, that's his job. 

“Listen, Clark —”

“I'm sorry,” Clark says quickly. “I didn't — I don't know what happened, I'm sorry for leaving, I'm sorry for what I did, but it wasn't… it wasn't me.”

Bruce watches him closely. For now, his pupils are as black as black can be, but it’s still far from what passes for normal with Clark. If he’d thought that Clark’s helpless expression yesterday had been worst it could be, he knows now that he was wrong. 

He offers Clark a small smile, resting a hand atop Clark's shoulder. 

“I know it wasn't you,” he says gently, thinking of the red points in the night and the immovable, vice-like grip of Clark’s fingers. “You have nothing to be sorry for. But we need to figure out what it is that's fucking around with your body so we can fix it.”

Clark swallows and drops his gaze again. Bruce has seen him afraid, and this seems pretty damn close. “Are you sure you _can_ fix it?”

“Maybe,” Bruce replies. The truth is that he still has no idea what he’s trying to fix, and it’s not like he has access to information about Kryptonian maladies and afflictions. “Maybe not. I'll run as many tests as I'm able to, but… at this point, I don't know.”

He squeezes Clark's shoulder gently, hoping that it provides some small comfort. If it were him in Clark's situation, the only comfort would be a solid answer, but Clark’s the sort of guy who runs on hope. As long as there’s some sliver of hope that this can be reversed, it might be enough to keep Clark’s spirits up.

“I'm sorry for waking you up last night,” Clark says finally. 

Bruce lets his hand slip from Clark’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. You got hold of yourself and that’s what matters.” He pauses. “Do you remember why you were there?”

Clark averts his gaze again, shoulders lifting in a faint shrug. Bruce doesn’t exactly want to press the issue, seeing as Clark had apparently been startled enough to flee the city because of it, but he can’t turn a blind eye to Clark’s obvious discomfort. He knows better than most when people are trying to feign ignorance to conceal things, and now that they know each other, Clark is as easy to read as any book.

“If you don’t want to tell me, you don’t have to. But if you were trying to kill me —”

“I wasn’t,” Clark says firmly. At least he sounds like he believes it. That must count for something.

Bruce nods. “I know. But if for some reason you were, if whatever this sickness is, whatever the hell’s possessing you, if it wants to hurt other people…”

He trails off, eyes narrowing, the wheels already turning in his head. Until now, he’d only wondered what could be wrong with Clark, what issue on the inside could be affecting his body and making it behave strangely — until now, aside from a quick thought given to lingering radiation from the kryptonite, he hadn’t considered that what’s affecting Clark might have come from the _outside_. 

As for what Clark had actually been doing, attempted murder or not, Bruce is sure that it will tie in somewhere too. Things like that usually do. There’s no need to dance around the issue, in his opinion, not when it might lead to important discoveries, but he’s gathered enough about Clark’s sensitivity to know that forcing a conversation like this won’t encourage Clark to open up.

“I hope that’s an ‘I just figured out what’s wrong with you’ look,” Clark says. Bruce rolls his chair back in front of the Computer, already on the hunt for information. He doesn’t know a hell of a lot about Kryptonian lifeforms, but he’s sure that if a green rock can bring a grown man to his knees, it’s possible that a red one can carry something capable of wreaking havoc from the inside out.

“How much do you know about parasites?” Bruce asks. Clark rolls closer on his own seat, glancing up at the screens. Bruce is already scrolling through pages of information about single-celled parasites and the symptoms they cause, and while it isn’t a definite answer, it’s at least a start.

 

Clark doesn’t stay overnight this time, unsurprisingly. Bruce has spent the entire day looking for possible explanations, and after sifting through hundreds of pages of information about microscopic parasites and the body’s immune response, he’s starting to believe he’s on the right track. Kryptonian biology doesn’t appear to be very different from human biology, and it stands to reason that if Earth can produce thousands of nightmare-inducing organisms that live off of larger creatures, it’s completely possible that Krypton would be capable the same thing. How a Kryptonian parasite has managed to latch itself onto Clark, Bruce hasn’t yet determined, but by the time he collapses into his bed in the early evening he feels somewhat more confident that he can find a solution.

For a few minutes, Bruce stares at the ceiling. When he closes his eyes, he can still see the points of light, and he has to stare hard again at the shadowy corners of his room to remind himself that he’s alone. 

 

He wakes suddenly, his sheets damp, the room warm from the summer air. Bleary-eyed and groggy, he throws back the sheets and the duvet and closes his eyes, prepared to roll over and go back to sleep, and only then does he notice the silence.

Living in an open house on a lake has its perks, but glass panes are sometimes a little too good at letting the heat in, and not quite so good at letting it cool after nightfall; now, as the first heatwave of the summer rolls over Gotham, the heat is more stifling than ever. In the total absence of curtains, Bruce tends to run central air conditioning for the entire duration of the summer, even often well into the fall, and sleep is usually comfortable even on the hottest summer night. Now, Bruce finds himself too aware of the quiet, the absence of the low drone of the circulation system as suspicious to him as an open door.

He walks through the house, barefoot and quiet. There are no unusual noises, no obvious signs of forced entry, no signs of life aside from himself. Bruce thrives in the shadows, but sometimes he can see why it might be a source of anxiety for some. Finally, he reaches the thermostat, and a quick once-over shows him that the temperature has been set higher than usual by ten degrees. He squints at the monitor, lowers the temperature by twenty, and pads slowly back to bed.

 

For three days Bruce searches every corner of the internet he has access to. He gathers and organises as much information as he can find on parasites, and even runs a few private searches on multiple encrypted databases for anything even remotely resembling red kryptonite, just out of curiosity. The trail runs cold, and Bruce is in the middle of sending an email to the heads of Wayne Biotech and the Research Institute to find more information about specific symptoms of parasitic activity when Clark calls out from the top of the stairs, “I tried the elevator this time. You don’t have any music?”

“I don’t need music when only two people use it,” Bruce replies. He glances back as Clark walks up behind him, inspecting his monitors, curious as ever. “Alfred let you in?”

“Yeah, he’s up there playing with some old thing Diana brought back. Make any progress yet?”

Bruce leans back and lets Clark move in closer to examine a side monitor. “You’re looking at it. Hard to diagnose something that’s never affected any human in existence.” He clicks a pen slowly, then taps it on the desk. “And what about you? How do you feel?”

Clark shrugs, then straightens up, hands in his pockets. “Fine, I think. It hasn’t gotten any worse. I can’t say much beyond that.” He studies Bruce’s face for a moment. “You’re thinking about something. What is it?”

Bruce takes a breath and lets it out slowly. “I’ve been thinking… I want to take a look at that kryptonite again. I don’t want to expose you to it, since we don’t know if it will exacerbate this, but…”

“What about General Zod? Could you get a sample of his… that thing’s DNA? Or whatever you need to work with?”

Bruce shakes his head. “Government has that _thing_ locked down. I’d never get in, not without risking exposure. The government would probably leap at the chance to arrest me. Or you, for that matter.”

“Actually, I don't think they're very concerned at all,” Clark points out. Bruce looks at him. “Sorry. It's a good thing, honestly. You're lucky the entire world isn't paying attention to you.”

“We have a high opinion of ourselves,” Bruce muses, and Clark ducks his head, sheepish. 

“You know I didn't mean it like that. Back to what you were saying, though. If you can't get a sample from Zod, I can probably… I don't know what you need, would you need to… take some sort of biopsy? A tissue sample?”

“Anything you can give me, as long as it doesn't hurt you,” Bruce says. He pauses, deliberating, and decides to throw caution to the wind. “I thought the easiest sample to obtain and test would be a fluid. Plenty of living cells to experiment on. No risk to yourself.”

“A fluid,” Clark repeats. “What, like a — a blood sample?”

“Blood would be perfect,” Bruce replies smoothly. He can feel his blood pressure going down already. “If it doesn't bother you.”

“It won't.”

“Good. Because if it does, I'm taking it anyway,” Bruce says. Clark smiles uncertainly at him, and Bruce lets his own expression soften. 

Despite Bruce’s best efforts to be gentle and Clark’s attempt to relax, Clark's veins prove difficult to penetrate. In the end, they make do with a small, needle-sharp shard of kryptonite, bleeding Clark under Bruce's careful supervision. He fills two small vials before Bruce decides that it’s time to stop, and Bruce whisks the kryptonite out of the room as quickly as possible. It takes several long minutes, but eventually Clark’s skin heals over without so much as a mark to indicate that anything had ever been there. Even the shaking doesn't last terribly long, though it takes some time for Clark to breathe properly again. 

Bruce has to bite his tongue. He'd been prepared to make a joke about kryptonite needles in the beginning, and he’s pretty sure Clark wouldn't have found it nearly as amusing.

“Just take it easy for a minute,” Bruce says, moving to store the vials at last. “If you start to feel strange, or if it gets any worse, let me know.”

“Sure,” Clark replies. There’s a bucket nearby, just in case, but Clark sits quietly while Bruce cleans up, scrolling through articles on his phone until Bruce announces, “You’re free to go, you know. I have everything I need.”

Clark nods, hesitant. “Sure. Just… before I go. The red, is it… is it still visible?”

Bruce steps back around the chair. “You have a flashlight on that thing?”

Clark turns the light on obediently and holds it out to Bruce. His eyes aren't emitting light the way they had before, and this time his pupils constrict to small round points, flashing red as the light reflects inside.

“You can see it, can't you?”

“It’s probably nothing to worry about,” Bruce replies, handing Clark's phone back. “And you never know, it might have been there all along. Everyone else was probably too polite to point it out.”

Clark chuckles quietly. “Yeah, you're probably right.” He begins to slide off of the chair, and Bruce steps back to give him space. Clark walks toward the door, then pauses, a faint smile tugging at his lips. “I just need to know. Earlier, you weren't going to ask me for blood, were you?”

“I was.”

“You weren't _just_ going to ask for blood,” Clark says. He looks as if he’s waiting to hear a punchline. Bruce clears his throat, leaning against the side of the table with his arms crossed, careful to maintain an even expression. Leave it to the reporter to see right through him. 

“It would have been less invasive,” he allows.

Clark grins, stepping backwards toward the door, seemingly satisfied with Bruce's answer. At least he’s getting some good out of this. “You know, if you really want, I can still…”

Bruce raises his eyebrows. He's never thought of Clark as being particularly prudish, but he still wouldn't expect —

“I mean, if you buy me a drink first,” Clark adds. He grins, and Bruce laughs before he can stop himself.

 

The room is stifling when Bruce wakes again, his hair and pillow damp, sheets sticking to his skin. This time he doesn't even bother trying to roll over; he kicks the linens off of the bed completely and winds through the house, making his way to the thermostat. He hopes it’s faulty wiring that’s causing the malfunctioning. It would be just too ironic if the heat were putting it on the fritz.

With the temperature set nearly twenty-five degrees lower than normal, Bruce climbs back into bed. He takes the dry side of the mattress, flips his pillow over, and stares at the lake until sleep comes. 

 

“Whoa, chilly in here,” Clark says with only one foot in the front door. Fully-clothed at his desk and with a mouthful of cereal keeping him occupied, Bruce only grunts in reply. The cold had become unbearable at some point during the night, but he’s left the air conditioning on until now just to punish himself.

“Think the system’s broken,” he says finally. “I'm going to have somebody look at it later today.” Clark nods in approval and takes a seat on the couch, and Bruce watches him glance around at the decor before asking, “What about you? Still hot under the collar?”

Clark looks alarmed. “Oh, uh, no, I don't know. I don't think so.”

Bruce chews thoughtfully, then jerks his head down the hallway. “You want to go downstairs and take a look? Make sure things are alright?”

“No, that's okay, I don't really want to inconvenience you.”

“It’s a Saturday. Don't worry about it,” Bruce says, as if that excuses the thousand and one things that he actually really does need to accomplish. He sits back in his chair and follows Clark's gaze out across the lake. “So if you're not here to inconvenience me, this is a social visit?”

Clark looks at him, startled. “I guess, yeah. I was in the area. I just thought I'd stop in, see if you weren't busy.” He eyes the papers on Bruce's desk, spreadsheets mingled with pages of the Gotham Chronicle. Bruce almost wishes there was something nice on the front page, just to prove that the city isn’t always caught between _Corpse in Session: Human Remains Discovered Outside of Solomon Wayne Courthouse_ and _Murky Waters: Oil Spill at Cape Carmine_.

“I have a few errands to run, but you’re welcome to make yourself at home for a few hours,” Bruce replies. He’s more accustomed to bringing people in than coming home to find company already present, but he can’t see the harm in letting Clark stay for the afternoon. Besides, it’s not as if Bruce needs to worry about him snooping through things. He doesn’t have very much left to hide from Clark these days.

Clark appears to contemplate it for a moment. Judging by the way he’s currently eyeing up his surroundings, Bruce suspects he hardly needs any convincing at all. 

“Sure,” he says. “Why not.”

 

Clark is sunning himself on the back deck when Bruce drives up, stretched out on a lounge chair in a pair of shorts and off-brand Wayfarers. Bruce tries to walk quietly, but it’s not like he can sneak up on someone like Clark.

“Go for a swim?” he asks, and Clark tips his head back, eyebrows shooting up from behind his sunglasses. Sometimes Bruce can’t help but wonder if Clark is ever genuinely surprised by anybody, or if he’s just conditioned himself to act that way. With senses as sharp as Clark’s, he wouldn’t be surprised if sometimes Clark just tunes the entire world out, sound by sound, voice by voice. God knows he would.

“Earlier. The water’s not bad. You ever swim in it?”

“Sometimes,” Bruce says. He shrugs out of his suit jacket and lowers himself into the chair next to Clark’s, toeing his shoes off until they fall onto the wooden slats. He glances over as Clark stretches his arms behind his head, the perfect picture of relaxation. “Still feeling okay?”

“Yeah. I feel pretty good, actually. Better than I have in a while. I think the sun helps a lot.” Clark turns his head slightly, crossing his ankles. “By the way, I messed around with your thermostat earlier. You’d freeze to death if you tried to keep it that low all day.”

Bruce chuckles. “Little too cold for somebody who breathes frost?”

“Something like that,” Clark replies. 

Bruce watches him for a moment, then looks back out over the lake.

“Maybe after lunch we’ll take a look at your temperature again. See if anything’s changed.” 

In truth, Bruce is starting to wonder if it hadn’t just been some sort of weird one-time health scare, like the Kryptonian version of a twenty four-hour flu. His contacts haven’t managed to pinpoint any sort of existing organism capable of creating a similar set of symptoms, Kryptonian biology aside. The dramatic rise in Clark’s temperature might have been a completely normal inflammatory response to some unidentified bug, for all he knows. 

Clark makes a noise of agreement, then laughs to himself. “You don’t need any more of those samples, do you?”

Bruce coughs politely. “It’s a beautiful day to fly back to Kansas,” he says. Clark grins to himself.

 

They eat together in Bruce’s kitchen, watching a breeze rustle the leaves outside while they make polite conversation about the Monarchs’ terrible early-season performance, and make their way underground after.

Clark’s temperature tops out at a steady 99.3 degrees, his thermogram a normally-coloured gradient of red and orange. Bruce frowns at the static image until Clark clears his throat and suggests: “Have you tried exposing my blood to the kryptonite yet?”

The mineral is hidden away in a protective storage case, stored in a thick-walled vault that has been cleverly concealed in a recess in the cave wall, further hidden in a back passage that Bruce hardly ever uses. He makes Clark stand a safe distance from the case before it’s opened, just as a precaution — that is, Clark floats on the other side of the glass, several metres above the tarmac, and watches as Bruce opens the case.

“Huh,” Bruce says. Clark floats a few feet closer to the glass as Bruce lifts the kryptonite out and holds it up. “Look at that.”

“Are you sure that’s…”

“The same kryptonite you gave me,” Bruce affirms, but even he’s having trouble believing it. Before, the kryptonite had glowed a brilliant red, its alien nature apparent even in direct light, but now it emits no light at all; even its texture seems to have changed: still jagged, but instead of glossy and smooth-looking the surfaces are dull, as if it were a regular rock cut from the inside of a cave. “Was it like this when you found it?”

“No, it was glowing when I found it. It looked the exact same when I left it with you. Are you sure you didn’t experiment with it?”

“If I did, I did it in my sleep,” Bruce says. He turns the rock slowly in his palm, then places it beneath a magnifying glass. As he inspects it more closely he can see smaller particles shining, like fine grains of sand catching the light. Compared to the way it had radiated colour before, it looks almost lifeless now.

On the other side of the window, Clark floats closer still. “Maybe it needs to be closer to my cells to turn on?”

Bruce squints at the rock. The green kryptonite had needed no such activation to glow as vibrantly as it had, but where neither of them have access to a database of information about the Kryptonian table of elements, they have nothing to lose by continuing to test it.

 

“I don’t fucking get it,” Bruce says, pushing himself away from the table. Clark stands nearby, arms folded over his chest, but at this point Bruce is sure that he could put the damned thing right into Clark’s hand and it wouldn’t do a single thing. A small sample of Clark’s blood lies on a glass plate, the drop exposed directly to a fragment of the ‘red kryptonite’, yet even under a microscope Clark’s blood smear has shown nothing more impressive than an apparent lack of cell diversity. That, however, piques Bruce’s interest, and when he tests another smear, this one untouched by the Kryptonian rock, he finds something even more interesting than that.

“So what does that mean?” Clark asks. He’s looked at the sample, too, but has confessed that his knowledge of blood composition is limited to what he’d learned in high school biology, to say nothing of the components of Kryptonian blood.

Bruce rolls his chair back to the Computer. “In a normal blood sample, you have a handful of different cells.”

“Red, white, and plasma?”

“Exactly. A normal blood smear would show something like this.” Bruce pulls up a static photograph, and a video loop of a sample of living cells next to it. “Those are red blood cells there, and these…”

This time he pulls up another picture highlighting small, grainy-looking cells, next to the projected image of Clark’s blood smears. “Leukocytes. White blood cells. That’s what makes up the majority of your immune system, fights infections. And in those samples —”

“That’s the one we exposed to the kryptonite?”

“That one there, yes, and that…” He points now to a nearly identical image. “That’s the sample we didn’t expose. No white blood cells. Nothing even remotely resembling white blood cells.” He swivels in his chair and stares up at Clark. “Your immune system’s shot.”

Clark blinks at him, and Bruce can almost see the wheels turning in his head. Clark is a smart kid, and neither of them are exactly scientists, but Bruce has spent a lot of time with the heads of his foundations and biomedical department heads over the years. He’s picked up a thing or two. “So… you think something wiped out my immune system and… some kind of parasite got in?”

“That’s the part I’m not sure of,” Bruce replies. He turns slowly, watching the monitor with the looped video. “If something had just _weakened_ your immune system, it might have left something for your body to fight back with. Hence the onset of symptoms, the fever… it might have been a parasite, or maybe just an infection that your body was trying to fend off. If it was something that had wiped out your immune system completely, there wouldn’t have been any primary line of defense to protect against an infection. Whatever it is probably would have killed you.”

Clark chews his lip. “So… you think that means I fought it off? Whatever it was?”

Bruce nods slowly. “With a fever like that, I sure fucking hope you fought it off,” he says. Clark smiles hesitantly, seemingly unsure whether he should be allowed to laugh at the possibility of a non-existent immune system, and after a moment Bruce turns back to the Computer. He suspects it may have been the kryptonite that had wiped clean Clark’s immune system completely, but he now has the same problem as before: with no regular samples to compare these results to, it’s hard to determine exactly what the cause is. “We’ll check the samples again and try to see if we get the same results. Spend some more time testing. Figure out where to go from there. Think you can handle a little bit more of this?”

Clark pulls up a chair, leaning in until Bruce can smell the lakewater on him. “I think so. I have no plans for tonight.”

“Now you do,” Bruce tells him.

 

Dinner is a much livelier affair, although it’s late in the afternoon by the time they actually leave the Cave. Bruce thinks Clark is surprised by the fact that he owns a barbecue, and maybe even more impressed by the precision with which Bruce can grill chicken. He’s pretty sure there isn’t a very good chance that they can both get drunk on a single bottle of celebratory wine, but it only seems appropriate to crack one open anyway. The lingering question of uncertainty over the current state of Clark’s immune system hangs over them like a cloud as they eat, but Clark seems quite happy to forget about it for a few hours.

Bruce doesn’t think he’s ever seen Clark smile this much. With the sun setting over the far side of the lake and casting a golden light over them, it’s hard to imagine that he’d ever considered him a threat at all.

 

“You’re sure I can’t convince you to stay for another hour?” Bruce asks. He leans against the pillar while Clark paces in circles in the driveway, the low drone of nighttime wildlife a comforting sound around them. “The stars will be out soon. This far out of the city, out on the lake like this...”

Clark chuckles and looks down at his shoes, then up at the sky. “I’m a Kansas boy, remember? Nothing but stars and open fields for miles. It won’t be dark there for a while, but compared to here...”

Bruce glances up too. Already there are a few points of light starting to brighten overhead. The nights are short and hot in the summer, and often the bright moon reveals a little more of him than he’d prefer to show, but Bruce enjoys them all the same. “You’re right. Your mother will be impressed when she finds out you’re getting close to a medical research degree.”

Clark shrugs, head tipped back as he takes a slow step forward, then stops. “Maybe. I didn’t really tell her about everything that was going on, the things we’ve been doing… I think she knows something was wrong, but I don’t want to worry her. She has enough on her mind.”

Bruce hums. He’s sure Martha has more than enough reason to be worried about her son. In Clark’s place, he’d likely do the same. God knows he’s tried it often enough with Alfred, but like most parents, the old man seems to have an uncanny ability to detect a lie. Figuring out the truth doesn’t tend to come long after. “Well… do what you have to.”

Clark turns, sneakers crunching on the gravel, his aimless steps keeping him within the same three-foot circle. “I will.” He paces again, and Bruce holds his tongue, tempted to point out that for all his talk of needing to get back home, Clark seems less than eager to leave. When his circle brings him closer to Bruce he makes eye contact, and Bruce offers a faint smile, encouraging.

“She’ll still be up waiting for you. You can catch her if you go now,” he says.

Clark nods decisively, then pauses in front of Bruce, his pattern interrupted as he spins in the gravel. “Yeah, I should. I just… thank you. For everything.”

Bruce stands straighter, amused. He hadn’t expected Clark to thank him. Maybe for dinner, but not for the rest. It’s what friends do. “You really make it sound like a goodbye,” he teases gently. “You going somewhere?”

“What? No, no, I’m not going anywhere, I'm just… I just wanted to thank you for helping me,” Clark says quickly. Bruce can believe it. He’s stubborn, that’s for damn sure. “I mean it. Thank you.”

Bruce would like to say that the first move is his, but in reality he’s sure that it’s Clark who beats him to it. Bruce makes no noise at all when Clark kisses him; his breath is still sweet from the wine, yet Bruce knows Clark doesn't have the excuse of intoxication to hide behind. When Clark doesn’t immediately pull away, Bruce chases the taste, sucking gently at his lip until Clark sighs, brushing his fingertips against Bruce’s jaw. Slowly, Clark licks into his mouth, and Bruce presses his own hand over Clark’s chest, curling his fingers in the fabric of his shirt to hold him closer.

It feels like no time has passed when Clark steps back, and Bruce can feel his heart pounding in his chest, seemingly louder even than the crickets. For several seconds they simply look at each other, and at last Clark wraps his fingers around Bruce’s hand, squeezing gently as he frees himself from Bruce’s grasp.

“You really should come see the stars in Kansas,” Clark says, already rising into the air. Bruce lets out a shaky breath, remembering belatedly to node, and then Clark is gone.

Stage III: Acute

“Your parents?” Clark asks. He leans in closer, inspecting the fresh flowers in the vase on the mantle next to the twin crypts. Bruce can't remember the last time he’d visited; the flowers from his last visit rest on the mantle, waiting to be disposed of, long since withered and crumbling to pieces.

“You couldn't have been very old,” Clark observes. The side-by-side markers date their deaths back to 1981 in blocky black letters that Bruce could trace with his eyes closed. “Do you remember them?”

“Yes.” He’d been eight years old then, and he remembers enough. He stands in the centre of the mausoleum now, surrounded by Waynes he’d known and Waynes he’d never met, his shoulders hunched beneath his jacket, head bowed in respect for the dead. “Sometimes. Memories are… it’s easier to remember them in dreams. The faces always seem closer. More familiar.”

Clark hums gently, his gaze moving between the names engraved in the smooth stone. Bruce knows that he could look right into their coffins if he wanted, though he doesn't envy that power. Seeing them that way would be disrespectful, and Bruce knows that he would still be too tempted to look.

“Do you ever dream that they're alive? What things would be like if they hadn't…?”

For a long moment, Bruce says nothing. “No.”

Satisfied, Clark nods, moving slowly toward the entrance. He pauses in the doorway, framed by the grey light behind him, and when he turns back his pupils gleam red in the shadows. “Do you ever dream that you’d gone with them?”

His eyes flicker in the direction of the crypts, and Bruce follows his gaze. Just above the names of his parents, another name has been engraved in the stone: **Bruce Wayne 1973 - 2017**. 

A shadow falls over the crypts, too large to be Clark. Bruce turns his head and sees not Clark blocking the light, but the monster that had killed him, the same terrible red burning in his eyes as Clark’s body slips lifelessly to the floor. The air begins to grow hotter around him, and it occurs to Bruce that a mausoleum should only be used to house the dead, not to cook it.

 

Bruce jolts awake, sitting upright before he realizes that he’d been lying down at all. He exhales hard, the sheets slipping down to his waist, then swears into the dark. 

The house is silent as he pads through it, the humidity thick and heavy on his skin and doing no wonders for his mood. His circulation system had been inspected and cleared the day before, for Christ’s sake.

Already the sky is starting to lighten outside the windows. Bruce can see the dark receding over the treetops, mist swirling gently over the lake’s surface, a lone loon drifting slowly past the shore. He’d only gone to sleep maybe an hour before, having taken a night off of patrolling the streets to stare out over the water and think over recent events, and had even checked the thermostat before downing a glass of whiskey and crawling into bed.

Irritated, Bruce blinks at the thermostat display — eighty-five degrees, nearly thirty more than the temperature outside the house. Bleary-eyed and exhausted, he doesn’t even have the energy to be angry about it. He punches in a sensible number and makes his way back to the dry side of his bed.

 

He wakes the moment the bedroom door opens. Groggy and still mostly asleep, Bruce rolls onto his other side, already dreading the thought of being awake before he’s managed to sleep the whiskey off. At this point, even the sunlight threatening to blind him from the bay windows is a more welcome sight than Alfred. “Don’t tell me,” he groans, and means it.

“There’s somebody who wants to speak to you. She’s asked for you by name.”

Bruce blinks his eyes open. He prefers to put people on hold until he’s at least managed to sit up straight. Usually, the people on the other end of the line have more than enough time to spare. “She called my house and asked for me? Can’t remember the last time that happened. Put her on hold.”

“You’re going to have to save your sabbath for another day, sir,” Alfred says solemnly. “She didn’t ask for Bruce Wayne. She asked for the Bat.”

 

“He was shaking when I found him this morning,” Martha explains hurriedly. “And his face was white. Like when your blood sugar drops too low. He told me he felt fine and said something about needing to be in the sun, but when I called for him he didn’t come, and I found him —”

They stop outside of an old barn, paint peeling from the sides and one door hanging open, and now she nods gravely at the black space within. 

“You’re sure he’s in there?”

Martha presses her mouth in a thin line. “I know he is.” 

Bruce can see now where Clark gets his worry from. He has his mother’s manners, too; the moment Bruce’s helicopter had landed in a stretch of field just beyond the farmhouse, she’d set upon him with a mother’s concern, asking about Clark’s recent behaviour and symptoms. If Bruce had to guess, he would think she’d known all along that Clark had been with him, or at least that extremely good at guessing.

Bruce reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small glass vial, then presses it into Martha’s hand.

“Hold onto this for me,” he says gently. “I don’t want it in there unless I’m sure we’ll need it.” Dutifully, Martha squeezes the vial tight and steps back. Bruce suspects she knows exactly what the vial holds, and he has a feeling that neither of them are eager to see it put to use.

Bruce steps into the shadow of the barn. Thin rays of sunlight seep through the gaps in the wood, yet despite the shade the air is hardly cooler inside than it is outside the structure, and no less humid. Hay litters the ground, scattered inside and around the empty stables, muting the earthy scent of the dirt floor.

“Clark,” he calls cautiously. With his lenses down, he can see Clark’s outline curled on the ground in the furthest stable. He switches it off again, and this time switches off the modulator at his throat. He’d only bothered to wear the suit at all as a precaution. “Clark, can you hear me?”

“Did you bring it?”

Bruce advances slowly. Clark’s voice is quiet, not in a way that suggests a need for privacy, but infirmity. “I brought it. It’s outside with your mother. Is it okay if I come in?”

As Bruce approaches the stable, he can see parts of Clark coming into view over the wooden sides of the stable: his head bowed, chin resting on his knees, his feet bare on the earth. Clark looks up with red eyes, and Bruce sees that his hair is tousled, standing on end as if he’d tried to pull it out.

“Tell me what happened.”

Weakly, Clark gestures toward his head. “It’s starting to take over. I can feel it.” He closes his eyes, the glow visible even through his eyelids. The red has spread beyond his eyes, branching out in thin lines from the corners, a living spiderweb of red reaching down his cheeks and disappearing into his hairline. “You have to help me finish this. This is the last thing I'll make you do. I promise.”

Bruce takes another step forward, preparing to kneel next to Clark when a firm hand stops him. “Don’t.” When he looks down, he can see that Clark’s veins are crawling with red beneath his skin.

“You have to let me take a look,” Bruce says. He tries to lower Clark’s hand, and before he knows it he’s flat on his back, the wooden stall door in splinters beneath him, dust particles swirling in the air. Clark stares straight ahead from several feet away, unblinking and wary as Bruce pushes himself to his feet. 

“You’re not going to convince me to stay away. I just want to take a look at you.”

“You won’t get close enough for that,” Clark says. Bruce can see his toes curling in the dirt, the muscles straining in his arms as he hugs his knees closer. “It won’t let you close enough to hurt me.”

Slowly, Bruce steps toward him, and Clark raises his hand again. Despite his strength, he looks utterly defenseless. Bruce raises his own in return, both palms held open, a gesture of peace. “I’m not going to hurt you. You know it’s trying to protect itself through you? Do you know what it is?”

He can see Clark’s fingers starting to curl, and he stops just inside the stall, several feet out of reach. Clark knows how to handle his strength, but the thing manipulating his body might not be so gentle, and likely won’t be nearly as forgiving as Clark. “I don’t know what it is. But I think I know what it wants.”

After a moment of consideration, Bruce reaches up and pulls off his cowl. Clark had regained control of himself once; if he knows that he’s being controlled, there may be a chance that he can try to fight back against it — at least, until they can find a way to rid him of this thing for good. 

As he leans to place his cowl on the ground, Clark’s hand suddenly shifts, swinging around in one unsteady movement to follow Bruce. Curious, Bruce straightens up more slowly, and watches as Clark’s hand wavers. Without visible pupils, it’s difficult for Bruce to see where Clark’s looking, but he thinks it’s somewhere around his shoulders. He waves a hand back and forth, experimental, and notes that Clark’s eyes don’t move. An intelligent organism, then, but it must not have full control over Clark’s senses just yet. That, or it’s removed Clark’s vision altogether.

“Can you still see?”

For a moment, Clark doesn’t respond. Bruce studies his face, and he can see that Clark’s eyes are moving, trying to focus on the source of the noise. He knows that Clark can see even while using his heat vision, but the glow in his eyes doesn’t appear to be a voluntary one. He remembers the way Clark’s eyes had glowed in the dark before Clark had pinned him to his bed, and wonders if it’s the organism within Clark attempting to display its control.

“You took off the mask,” Clark says finally.

An easy enough guess. Clark’s hearing doesn’t seem to have changed, and Bruce hadn’t been quiet about removing the cowl. “Can you see me, Clark?”

Clark’s jaw clenches, a pained expression crossing over his face. “I wish I could.”

Bruce aches suddenly, though he’s not sure if it’s out of sympathy or something worse. Losing his enhanced visual field after removing the cowl is debilitating enough, sometimes, even with vision as good as his. He can’t imagine what it must be like to lose such a powerful sense as Clark’s vision, to go from all-seeing to fully blind. Now, Clark can’t even see his face to identify him, and with no way to visually confirm that Bruce is indeed unarmed and non-hostile, he’s not sure that the thing in Clark’s body will believe that Bruce isn’t a threat.

Clark startles as Bruce begins to lower himself to the ground, but Bruce stays a safe distance away, and Clark makes no move toward him. His hand is still outstretched, prepared to fend Bruce off.

“Tell me what it wants,” Bruce says finally. “Your senses? Your powers?”

Clark swallows. His hand begins to lower, and he hugs his knees to his chest, again his sightless red eyes still fixed on Bruce. “It wants heat,” he says quietly. “Heat and darkness. Humidity.”

Heat and humidity? He thinks of Clark complaining about the air conditioning, Clark lying in the sun in a heatwave, Clark finding him in the middle of the night in what had felt like a heatwave to Bruce. Now even Clark’s fever is starting to make sense. His body had never fought off the invader. 

It had welcomed it in. 

“You think it wants you to incubate it?”

“I’ve been doing that for five months, Bruce. It’s past that. All that’s left is for me to die and let it spread.” Clark raises his hand and touches the back of his neck, the base of his skull, then lets his hand drop again. His veins run like red threads across his skin, over the backs of his hands and along his forearms, all the way beneath his shirt. Bruce can even see them in his neck, when Clark lifts his head. “You know, I can — I can feel it, right here. It’s starting to break through.”

Bruce’s stomach clenches. He imagines Clark’s head swelling, his skull splitting open, Clark lying dead with nothing but glowing rock spilling out. “Break through what? Your brain?”

Clark smiles faintly. He shifts back, resting his weight against the wooden wall of the stable, and Bruce watches a tear track down his cheek. A tendril of red follows, a living thing chasing the moisture over Clark’s skin. “No,” he murmurs, “it’s already in there.”

He closes his eyes and Bruce clears his throat. “I’m going to talk to your mother,” he says quietly, already climbing to his feet and reaching for his cowl. He stands for a moment, assessing. Clark no longer seems concerned about following his presence, which means that the organism within him must be starting to believe that Bruce isn’t a threat. He only hopes that he can keep it that way. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

Clark hums faintly behind him, and he pauses by the door, cowl still in his hand. “Try not to listen in.”

 

In Martha’s small kitchen, Bruce feels absurdly out of place. He knows that he would take up too much space even without the Batsuit, and yet he has a feeling that he would look even sillier sitting at the worn table in a skin-tight undersuit. Being in this house in the suit he’d departed in would just remind him of the past. With Clark on a downward spiral just yards away, he would rather not revisit that feeling.

Bruce sighs heavily when Martha takes a seat across from him and places the vial on the table between them, thankful for a reason to focus on something other than the details of Clark’s childhood home. The more he thinks about it, the more morbid it is.

“Do you think he’s listening?” Martha asks. 

Bruce shakes his head. “I think he’ll try to force himself not to.” If Clark’s hearing is under his own control, he should be able to narrow his focus and drown out their voices. In any case, it isn’t Clark that Bruce doesn’t want listening in. Just the thing inside him.

Martha gazes down at the shard of kryptonite in the vial, the rock glittering green in the sunlight. She seems shaken, and understandably so, but Bruce admires the way she carries herself. She’s always had confidence in her son, and it’s not difficult to tell that she believes in him even now. “He won’t let anybody get close to him. But he’s fighting it. I could hear it in his voice.” She pauses, catching Bruce’s gaze. “You know what he’s like. I think you could hear it too.”

Bruce offers her a brief smile. After a moment, he sighs and pulls the gauntlets off of his hands, setting them on the table next to the cowl. Martha watches him, and Bruce finds his smile reflected softly on her face. It’s been some time since he’s seen Martha face-to-face like this, but it’s not as if she wouldn’t remember him. He’d paid for the funeral, after all. It had been an anonymous act, but Martha is a smart woman, and Bruce had lingered at Clark’s grave almost as long as Lois had. It’s not as if she couldn’t find him on the internet or on some television program, anyway.

“I don’t want to kill him,” he says finally. “He might think that’s the only option now, but after what happened last year… I know what this does to him. I almost didn’t bring it.”

Bruce uncorks the vial and lets the kryptonite fall into his palm. He holds it between his fingers, spinning it slowly until Martha says, “He wanted you to bring it for a reason. He trusts you to do the right thing. That’s why he wanted me to find you. He asked for you for a reason.”

Bruce wants to tell her that he’d tried to do what he thought was right before, and Clark had almost died because of it. In the end, he had died because he would never let anybody hurt themselves for him. It’s almost ironic, he thinks, that Clark would do the same now to protect mankind from yet another threat from his own planet, except this time it involves letting Bruce follow through with what he’d planned to do in the first place. 

He wants to tell Martha that Clark trusts her too, and that he loves her so much that he’d hidden his illness from her until it was too late. He wants to tell her that Clark had trusted him to do the right thing when he’d come to him, dizzy and nauseous and overheated, and that in letting him reach this stage Bruce has already failed him again.

Instead, he leans forward, holding the kryptonite up for Martha to see. “He didn’t give me enough time to prepare, and I won’t have time to weaponize this. Something this size will weaken him. It _might_ kill him. I don’t know for sure. But I’ll have to be close to use it, and he’ll know if I have it on me. That thing in him won’t be happy if I go back in with this.”

He glances out the window. The edge of the barn is just barely visible, but Bruce suspects that Clark won’t be moving very far until nightfall. Now he can’t help but wonder if Clark had refused to stay because he’d known what would happen at night, but he buries the thought deep down. He’ll have time to reflect on Clark’s behaviour later. Now, Clark needs him. 

“You’re going to have to distract him.”

Martha has been listening intently, and now she nods at Bruce, solemn and understanding.

 

Bruce knocks before he enters the barn. His cowl is back on, but the voice modulator is off and his lenses have been retracted. He would prefer to make direct eye contact, in the event that Clark has managed to regain his sight. “I'm coming in, Clark.”

He opens both doors this time, the light falling in a distorted rectangle over the ground. The corner stable is still suitably dark and damp, although the small rays of sun shining through have shifted somewhat. The barn is silent, and Bruce walks slowly, making each footfall loud and clear. “Are you still here?”

Still no response. Bruce would be more nervous if he hadn't already scanned the barn and found Clark to be in the same place, his temperature and vitals seemingly steady. Now he approaches the stall carefully, and finds Clark curled on his side on a pile of hay, his eyes half-open, back nestled against the wood. 

“Hey,” Bruce says quietly, kneeling at the front of the stall. “You still with me?”

Clark blinks, eyes shifting slowly in Bruce's direction. He moves sluggishly now, pushing himself upright, head tilting toward the source of the noise. “Sorry,” he says finally. “Heat’s making me tired.”

He coughs suddenly, a horrible, wet sound, then slumps against the wall, eyes sliding shut again. Bruce simply watches. He isn't sure how close the kryptonite needs to be to start affecting Clark, but he’s willing to risk getting closer if that's what he needs to do. 

“I feel like a zombie,” Clark says after a minute. “I didn't think The Walking Dead was scary until now.”

Bruce chuckles quietly, more for show than out of any real amusement. “Think you'd like to get up and bite me?”

Clark hums, lips turning up faintly before he coughs again. Bruce shifts closer, cautious, but Clark doesn't seem to mind even when Bruce removes his cowl and sets it aside. “Yeah, maybe I will.”

He lapses into silence, then: “You know what you have to do, don't you?”

Bruce takes even longer to respond. There’s a tired resignation to Clark's voice, as if death is something that he's accepted the idea of already. The very fact that he’s so willing to go is beyond Bruce completely; if it were him, he'd find something worth fighting for, but Clark has been through far worse than he has, and things don’t look overwhelmingly good now.

“I know. I have it with me.” There's a lump in Bruce's throat, suddenly, and he finds himself swallowing hard before adding, “You should talk to your mother first. She wants to see you.”

Clark coughs again. Bruce wonders if it’s the kryptonite’s proximity that’s affecting him this way, or if his lungs are starting to fail him too. “Not like this, Bruce. I can't move, and she shouldn't… she shouldn't be in here. I don't think she should come near me.”

Bruce shuffles closer, now only feet from where Clark rests. “I thought of that too. Seems like this thing has more power in the dark. Sunlight won't kill you, right? You said it helped you feel better before. It makes you stronger.”

Clark shakes his head. “It’s not going to work. I can't stand up. I can barely move.” 

“I'll help you,” Bruce says. “I can carry you to the door. You can say goodbye there. I'll bring you back in, make you comfortable.” He pauses when Clark opens his eyes, and adds softly, “She deserves some closure. She won't get it with you hiding in here.”

Clark’s fingers curl around his wrist when he reaches out, and Bruce lets out a slow breath, stilling himself as red eyes turn on him. “Clark. It’s just me. Let me help you. I'm going to take you to your mother. That's all I'm going to do. Can you hear me?”

It takes a moment for the message to sink in, but Clark’s grip begins to loosen. Bruce moves in closer, and he takes Clark’s hand gently, pulling it around the back of his neck. “There you go, easy. Help me out, come on.”

The last time he’d helped Clark stand, Clark had been able to assist him. This time Clark leans heavily against Bruce’s side, his breathing shallow and laboured as Bruce helps to pull him upright. They take a step forward once Bruce is sure that they won’t collapse beneath Clark’s weight, and Bruce turns his head, nosing against Clark’s hair.

“I'm sorry this happened to you,” he says softly. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help.” 

Clark coughs again, fingers digging into Bruce’s arm as he struggles to remain standing. They take another step together, then another. “You helped me more than anybody else,” he whispers. He shivers against Bruce’s side, then coughs again, a wracking sound that causes them to stop. Bruce grips him tighter, thinking of the last major reaction Clark had had to the kryptonite. The barn doors seem impossibly far away now.

They reach the entrance at last, and in the sun Clark even manages to stand on his own with one arm braced on Martha’s shoulder. Bruce keeps his distance to allow them some semblance of privacy, and although he doesn’t listen to what they’re saying, he can still see how tightly Martha hugs him, how fragile Clark looks even bathed in Kansas sunlight. What had given him inhuman abilities before now seems to be the only thing keeping him upright, and it pains Bruce to think of what might happen to Clark once the sun sets. He thinks about what Clark had said the night before, and he knows that by the time the stars come out in Kansas again, Clark may no longer be alive to appreciate it.

They embrace, and at last Martha glances over, her cheek resting against Clark’s shoulder as she catches Bruce’s eye. Clark’s body nearly dwarfs her own, but he holds on for as long as he can, and for a brief moment it’s easy for Bruce to imagine him twenty years younger, a child hiding in the comfort of his mother’s arms. Clark shudders visibly now, Martha swaying under his weight but holding steady, and Bruce feels a deep pang of sadness for them both. It isn’t easy to say goodbye to your parents, and it’s just as difficult to say goodbye to your child.

Bruce makes his way over slowly, bracing Clark’s back with a gentle hand as he tries to step away from Martha, his breath coming in short, unsteady gasps. He can see Martha’s hands clenched into tight fists, her arms still wrapped around Clark’s torso, trembling from the effort of holding him up. Suddenly Clark stumbles, threatening to pull Martha to the ground, and now Bruce takes up the slack, letting Clark’s weight rest in his arms to lessen the strain on Martha. 

After several seconds, Clark's breathing stutters, then stops completely. He goes lax in Bruce’s arms, arms slipping from around Martha’s waist; only then does Martha release him, her hands still clenched in shaking fists around the kryptonite shards as Bruce lowers Clark’s body to the ground.

“I'll take him from here,” he says quietly. 

When he looks up, Martha simply nods at him, stoic, twin trails of tears shining on her cheeks in the sun.

 

“He’s not going to get better in there, you know.” 

Bruce glances back to find Alfred standing behind him, two mugs of coffee in his hands. He takes one, curling his fingers around the hot ceramic, then returns his gaze to Clark’s still body. 

It’s taken half a day for Bruce to repurpose the medbay, and now it functions as a pseudo alien life support system. Clark lies motionless on the chair in the centre of the room, and around him Bruce has arranged a perimeter of UV lamps and kryptonite fragments, a precarious balance of radiation that has, for nearly two days, kept Clark in a state of suspension. The infection hasn't spread, the ultraviolet radiation is keeping the kryptonite from killing him outright, and Clark’s vital signs are being monitored around the clock, but Bruce knows that Alfred’s right. He’s trying to buy himself time, but time is running out. 

Eventually, the radiation from either the lamps or the kryptonite will win out, and either way Clark will be lost. 

“I just need more time,” Bruce murmurs. “If I could just find a way to flush the infection out of him…”

He’d hoped to find a way to liquefy kryptonite. With the kryptonite powder pressurized and mixed into a smoke bomb, the effect had been instantaneous once Clark had breathed it in. Repeated exposure to the pure kryptonite particles had left him weaker each time, and Bruce is sure that if he were to try it now he would simply damage Clark’s lungs and body beyond repair. He needs a way to dilute and inject it. A saline solution might have been ideal — an antibiotic for aliens, if such a thing were possible — but even crushed into a fine powder the kryptonite has proven insoluble in every aqueous solution that Bruce has tried so far. If he could spend several years learning the ins and outs of chemistry and the finer points of refining radioactive crystals, he’s certain that he could come up with some sort of compound that would kill the organism inside Clark’s body without killing Clark. As it is, he doesn’t have the resources, the know-how, or the time needed to create something like that.

Alfred makes a disapproving noise next to him. “It might have been kinder to let him die,” he points out, turning away at last. Bruce frowns, but says nothing as Alfred makes his way down the stairs. Alfred doesn’t dislike Clark, and he’s only speaking the truth. Under the blue-purple light of the lamps and the fluorescing kryptonite, Clark doesn’t look any closer to good health than he had in the dark stable corner in Kansas.

Bruce sighs. It’s time to get back to work.

 

The day stretches on, bleeding into the night, and Bruce finds himself staring through a magnifying lens at the mineral that had started it all. He’d mixed a small amount of dust from the green kryptonite into distilled water, disappointed to find a fine layer of particles lying on the bottom of the flask. Considering the green kryptonite’s insolubility, and given that this had happened the last time he’d experimented with kryptonite, he isn’t particularly surprised. Irritated, he pours the solution through a filter and leaves a heating lamp on the lump of green mud to evaporate the rest of the moisture. 

He returns with a sandwich and sits in front of his workstation, slipping the dried powder beneath his lens in place of the kryptonite fragment, and frowns at the sample. So finely ground, it looks even more dead than the fake kryptonite geode. Bruce stares hard at it for a moment, glances at the kryptonite mineral, then turns his gaze back to the flask of filtered water on the table. 

“Huh,” he says to himself. In his initial experiments, crushed green kryptonite had appeared to melt into the water at first, but hadn’t actually been soluble. Each time Bruce has been left with a wet sample of fluorescent kryptonite mud and a solution of copper dissolved in water, but had initially dismissed it once he’d determined that the copper particles had simply been helping to hold the kryptonite together, leaving him with what he’d been looking for at the time: pure kryptonite. The copper solution had been useless to him then, when all he’d needed was a way to purify the mineral. 

From the table in the corner, Alfred looks up. He’s been working on heating kryptonite powder, despite the fact that Bruce must have tested its melting point half a dozen times already, but has so far only succeeded in turning the dust black instead.

Bruce lifts the flask slowly, examining it in the light. “It’s like an ore, right? The kryptonite falls apart in the water because the water is dissolving the copper in it.”

“We know that already,” Alfred points out. He’d helped where he could when Bruce had initially experimented with the green kryptonite, but had let Bruce do most of the heavy lifting and had listened as Bruce had vented his frustrations. Now, however, he’s been assisting Bruce around the clock, and Bruce thinks their frustration levels are neck and neck “What’s different about it now?”

Bruce sits back in his chair and takes a bite of his sandwich. He chews thoughtfully, then says, “Small copper particles in water. Metallic particles in a fluid. What do we know about small metallic particles in a fluid?”

He can see the realization beginning to dawn on Alfred’s face. Bruce is still barely a step ahead of him, still struggling to fit all the pieces together properly in his head, but Alfred has always been quick to catch on.

“The magnetorheological fluid,” Alfred says. He glances down briefly at the small sample of kryptonite that he’s been experimenting with. “But copper particles won’t have any effect on him even with a magnetic field. As for the kryptonite particles themselves...”

“Think uranium, Alfred. It’s just this mineral form that’s a crystal.” 

Bruce rolls the chair to the Computer and begins typing. “I thought it was like fluorite this entire time, but...”

“There isn’t any fluorine in the compound,” Alfred points out. He lifts himself out of his chair and stands behind Bruce, watching over his shoulder as Bruce pulls up pages of information on uranium: ore, radioactivity, molecular structure, enrichment, uses for fuel.

“No, but look — the structure, Alfred, that crystal structure. Remember the fluorite, the way we thought the kryptonite’s crystal structure was similar because it reacted to the UV light, but it’s actually more similar to —”

He pulls up several pictures for comparison: identical molecular structures of fluorite, uranium dioxide, and his own sample of kryptonite, each turning on its axis. Next to them, a sample of a nuclear fuel: uranium dioxide, a black crystal dust identical to the one on Alfred’s table.

“It’s just radioactive alien ore,” Bruce says. He sits back in his chair, scrubbing a hand over the side of his face. “It’s still just fucking metal. If we can grind it up fine enough, get it in a smart fluid, alter the magnetic field around it somehow…”

“I’ll get Lucius on the phone,” Alfred tells him. 

As he bustles off, Bruce swivels in his chair, gazing in the direction of the medbay. He has no idea if it will work or not, but if Lucius can help them alter the state of microscopic kryptonite particles by warping the magnetic field around them, then around Clark, he should be able to inject it into Clark’s bloodstream. Diluted, or even administered slowly enough, he hopes there’s a chance that it might be strong enough to destroy the thing inside, but weak enough that Clark can live through the procedure.

Still turning in his chair, Bruce’s gaze falls upon the remaining kryptonite fragments scattered on various suspended tables across the lab. 

He’s going to need a needle.

Stage IV: Convalescence

Clark spends nearly six hours heaving into a bucket.

Alfred makes a hasty excuse about having to pay taxes about ten minutes after Clark wakes up, and Bruce doesn’t bother trying to convince him to stay. He does try to avoid looking at whatever it is that Clark’s retching up, mostly because he’s fairly sure it’s some sort of organic tissue. The red in his veins had seemed to neutralize with the kryptonite injection, but there are still pieces of red tissue peeling from Clark's face and eyes. Worse than that, it smells like it’s been decaying for weeks already. He stays because Clark seems to appreciate the company, even if the smell does force Bruce into the far corner of the room.

“You should get some sleep,” Clark mumbles. “I’ll be okay by myself.”

It takes a moment for Bruce to realize that it’s Clark who’s speaking, and then another moment to realize that Clark is actually speaking to him. He yawns, blinking lazily at the outline of Clark’s hunched shoulders, and sinks down further in his chair.

“I don’t mind,” he replies quietly, closing his eyes again. “Told your mother I’d keep an eye on you until you’re well enough to go home.” Bruce actually can’t remember when he’d last slept, not counting the number of times he’s nearly dozed off in the past three hours. Now that the shock of Clark vomiting up what appears to be his own internal organs has passed, Bruce’s body is beginning to shut down at last. Years ago Bruce might still have had a few hours left in him, but now it’s a hell of a lot harder to go days without sleeping.

Clark makes a quiet sound, forehead resting on the rim of the bucket. He’d made a brief effort to talk to Martha over the phone, but for the most part he hasn’t been able to manage more than a few words at a time. Bruce almost thinks it’s better that he’s given up trying to speak for the time being; it’s difficult to hold a conversation when ninety percent of it is gagging noises, and aside from an incredibly sincere ‘I’m glad you’re alive’, Bruce can’t seem to come up with anything especially interesting to say to say to him.

He dozes off again after some time, comforted by the sound of Clark’s heaving, his sleep peaceful in the cool air of the Cave.

 

Thunder rumbles in the air, rolling across the clouds and fading into the sky across the water. The rain had stopped half an hour before, the thunder and lightning moving out across the river and away from the city, leaving puddles that shine under the streetlights and easing the humidity that had plagued the city during the day. The storm will hit Metropolis soon, then leave its air as cool and calm as Gotham’s when it moves on. 

It must be one of the last of the summer storms, Bruce thinks. The summer months have passed quickly, and even with the second half of August still remaining, the nights are already growing longer.

“It’s dry down here,” he says to the city at large. He’s been tucked away in an alcove for the better part of the storm, shielded from the rain, watching people in the street run for shelter. Now that the rain has stopped, Gotham is beginning to come back to life far below him, but Bruce and the nightcrawlers aren’t the only ones hidden in the dark.

There’s been no sonic boom to herald Clark’s arrival this time, but Bruce can hear him land on the rooftop all the same, his footsteps soft as he walks above the alcove. This time last year, a sonic boom would have meant Superman was on his way. Bruce knows now that a quiet, unassuming entrance is more Clark’s style. He prefers this.

Clark drops down next to Bruce and straightens up, curling his fingers around the stone ledge as he looks out over the city. He’s back in his armour tonight, the chainmail slick from the rain, almost black in the shadows. Bruce has to fight back a smile. 

A streak of lightning spiderwebs across the underside of the clouds, lighting up the bay and the streets below. For a moment, neither of them speak, content to listen to the sounds of the city rising from beneath them. The thunder rumbles again, already more distant.

“Is this you taking me up on my offer?” Clark asks finally. Bruce glances at him, then smiles faintly, looking back out over Gotham. 

“I could use the help, if you're still interested. How are your interrogation skills?”

“I _was_ a reporter,” Clark points out. Bruce chuckles. He only vaguely remembers the way Clark had looked with glasses; he’d even seen Clark’s obituary in the Daily Planet and had hardly recognized him then. Now, Clark doesn’t go to any real lengths to disguise himself, aside from forgetting to shave for a day or two, and even then he’s hard to miss.

“Well, this isn’t a job you’ll be going on the record for. And you don’t have to worry about being polite.” He pauses, glancing down at the foreign lettering wrapping around Clark’s arms. He hasn’t yet asked about it, but he’d noticed it on the symbol on Clark’s chest and gauntlets, too, when he’d had the time to inspect the armour more closely. “You’re gonna need a new suit if we’re working together. Better logo.”

Clark laughs, a bright sound, then nudges his shoulder against Bruce’s. “Speaking of suits… this new?”

Bruce lifts a shoulder, nonchalant, hoping that Clark doesn’t notice how pleased he is. The tri-weave carbon fibre outer shell hasn't been replaced, but the damping gel beneath it has. The micro plating, too. “I tinkered around under the hood. Took a couple weeks to figure out how to configure the new tech, but Alfred and I managed to get our hands on a shiny, electromagnetic, non-Newtonian upgrade. Now, if someone manages to put a hole in me, the Suit will help compress it. Keep me from bleeding out until I can make a getaway.”

“That’s kind of dramatic,” Clark says mildly, and Bruce is even more pleased to see that Clark actually looks impressed. Clark looks impressed most of the time when Bruce explains the workings of his gadgets, even if he doesn’t understand a word of it, but this is a technology that Clark has come to sort-of-maybe understand over the past several weeks. “You don’t usually have a problem with that sort of thing, do you?”

“No, but it’s nice to have the option. And with the shit we’re about to dive into, it doesn't hurt to be prepared.”

Clark nods slowly, his arm still pressed against Bruce’s. Bruce can’t feel his body heat through their suits, but he can feel the pressure of Clark's body as it leans into his.

“So… you _are_ taking me up on my offer,” Clark says slowly. “Just so we’re clear?”

“Just so we’re clear,” Bruce confirms. “I thought that was obvious.” He’d known from the moment Clark had offered his assistance that he would accept it. There’s been a string of major robberies across the eastern coast, the last of which had happened in New York City, reportedly the work of a single man with an affinity for expensive jewelry, priceless works of art, and uncrackable vaults. As it happens, whispers in Bruce's ear have pointed him toward not one man, but a rather diverse team of three, with whisperings of a greater organization supplying them with everything they need to pull off large-scale heists. Bruce is interested in the thieves, naturally, but there’s always a higher power at work. Paintings don't simply disappear into thin air.

“Nothing about you is obvious,” Clark informs him. Bruce pretends he doesn’t notice the change in Clark’s tone — what is it, he wonders, disappointment? Resignation? — and turns his attention instead to the sound of voices far below. He flips his lenses down and locks onto a small group of heat signatures several streets to the west, their voices becoming more clear as he hones in on the noise. 

“Look there. Three men, two in body armour, all with concealed weapons.” Nothing more serious than handguns, as far as he can tell, and body armour can only protect from physical damage. Bruce has better plans for them than that. “So, what, you think you’re an open book?”

Clark leans forward, bracing himself on the railing as he tracks the thieves across the city. Bruce can hear a lady’s laughter, the sound too rich and genuine for a place like Gotham. “I don’t know… sometimes. Maybe. I try not to hide things from people. You know there’s only two men, right? One of them is a woman. Do they have the information you need?”

They do, and Clark knows it, so Bruce ignores the question. Clark has been skirting around certain topics for weeks now: the agonizing homeostasis he’d been kept in, mainly, and for the most part he’s hidden it well. It’s obvious now that they’re simply circling another subject, the one that Bruce has been thinking of more often now that Clark isn’t on the brink of being taken over by an alien virus, and he’s starting to get tired of waiting for Clark to bring it up. “The night before the infection got worse. Did you know?”

Clark turns his head slowly. Bruce keeps his gaze steady, and he can hear the wariness in Clark’s tone when he replies, “Did I know what?”

“That the symptoms were going to get worse.”

“Of course I didn’t, what kind of…” Clark stops, tilting his head, eyebrows furrowing in confusion. “You think I wouldn’t have told you if I knew I was going to get worse? After all the trouble you went through to try to help me, you still think I would try to hide that from you?”

“I’m not accusing you of being dishonest,” Bruce says. His voice sounds harsh with the modulator, at odds with the sincerity of his words. Frustrated, he switches it off and flips up the lenses, holding Clark’s gaze steady. “I want to know if you kissed me because you thought you were going to die.”

He’d hoped to feel an immediate rush of relief with the subject out in the open. He would have been more relieved if Clark had brought it up first. Now, as Clark takes a step backwards to look at him, all he feels is a rush of disappointment. 

“You’re still angry,” Clark says softly. “And you have every reason to be, Bruce, but I wasn't trying to offend you, I just —”

The first move this time is Bruce’s. He steps forward, so close that Clark has to tip his chin up to hold his gaze. He remembers facing Clark this way in another lifetime, and yet it’s an entirely different adrenaline picking Bruce’s heart rate up now. He’d never been close to Clark before then, hadn’t known the way he would smell, hadn’t known that his eyes weren’t all blue, hadn’t known the rhythm of Clark’s heart or the temperature of his body or the way Clark’s gaze slips, perhaps without Clark even meaning to do it, to Bruce’s mouth.

“Stop me if I'm wrong,” he growls, and kisses Clark firmly.

It takes Clark a moment to get his footing, but Bruce finds himself groaning as Clark shoves him back into the alcove. His back hits the wall and then Clark hits him, a solid weight pressing up against the entire length of Bruce’s body as Bruce struggles to free his arms and get his hands on the sleek metal covering Clark’s body. 

If the gentleness of Clark’s kiss had taken Bruce’s breath away before, it’s the opposite that does so now; Clark kisses him almost desperately, his hands rising and gripping either side of the cowl, and this time Bruce gives as good as he gets, biting down when he can to feel the way Clark whines and arches against him. 

He can feel the flush of heat in his veins even as the initial spike of desperation begins to dissolve into something more patient, and Bruce makes appreciative noises as Clark licks into his mouth, hot and slow like molten lava. When Bruce needs to catch his breath, Clark kisses the corner of his mouth and the curve of his jaw, thumbs tracing the outline of Bruce’s skin where it meets his cowl.

“Your thieves are getting away,” Clark mumbles after a moment. “Should we go after them?”

Bruce laughs, low and dangerous and still a little breathless. He runs a hand down Clark’s side, thumbing slowly over the flare of his hip, pleased by the way Clark shudders. 

“This is my city,” he rumbles, tilting his head as Clark’s fingers slip down to the base of his throat. “Nobody hides from me.”

Bruce’s cowl clatters to the ground. In the distance, the thunder rumbles over Metropolis, the last of the summer storms bidding its final farewell.

 

Bruce has already unfastened the heavy-duty belt around his waist, the metal containers noisy as they fall on the table, and he’s reaching for the clasps on the side of his legs that will allow him to shed the heavy armour plating when Clark’s hand stops his own. 

“Just leave it on for a minute,” Clark insists. He’s still in his own armour, a streak of dirt on his face, dust in his hair. 

Bruce turns slowly to look at him, eyebrows raising behind several layers of titanium and carbon fiber as Clark’s fingers trail over the backs of his gauntlets and up his arms. “Eager to see if I can take you in a fight again?”

Clark smirks at him, reaching up briefly to pat the metal part of Bruce’s cheek before he lets his hands slip down to the overlapping plating covering Bruce's abdomen. “Oh, I’m not worried about whether or not you can take me. In fact…”

He pulls the lowest piece of armour — a thick, molded piece of metal designed to protect his groin — from Bruce’s suit with a careless flick of his wrist. The metal clangs against the floor, and Bruce sucks in a breath as Clark brushes clever fingers along the exposed tri-weave material covering his inner thighs.

“I think I’d like you to.”

Bruce can already feel the familiar coil of arousal in his belly. He can't feel Clark's fingers through the layers of armour, but he can certainly feel the weight of a loaded statement like that. He knows that Clark is touching him, too, and when he looks down he can see that Clark's fingers have paused over the curved surface of the carbon fibre between his legs. 

“You’re playing a dangerous game,” Bruce warns him, yet he stands still as Clark kneels in front of him, gaze fixed on the seam of the Suit’s fabric. 

Slowly, Clark leans forward and drags the flat of his tongue over it. Bruce swears, reaching for Clark’s head, his gauntlets suddenly too bulky for his liking; he shoves them off carelessly and fists a hand in Clark’s hair, growling as Clark licks him through the Suit again. He can feel himself growing hard despite a total lack of direct contact, and when Clark glances up at him, his eyes heavy-lidded, Bruce pulls his hair taut and rocks his hips against Clark’s mouth.

He could get off like this, he thinks, and then Clark mouths at the protective shell covering his groin. “Bruce,” he murmurs. “Bruce, c’mon.”

 

Bruce jerks awake, his body too warm under the blankets, and when he shoves them aside he hears a noise of protest from the spot next to him before an arm snakes around his waist. The contact startles him even more than the sound of Clark’s voice.

“Must've been some dream,” Clark observes, pressing his lips to Bruce's shoulder. Bruce blinks his eyes open, squinting against the light, and tries to slow his racing heart, but he knows that Clark can likely feel it all the same. 

“You woke me up?” Bruce asks. His voice is still thick with sleep, and his vision is too blurry to see properly just yet, but he feels like he's just run a marathon. Even his breathing is fast, and he can still feel the phantom sensations from his dream, the details of it still so vivid in his mind that for a short moment he almost wishes Clark had left him there.

Behind him Clark hums, amused, nuzzling against the bare skin of Bruce’s shoulder. “Yeah. You were making some pretty weird noises. You started humping the bed, so I figured it was time to bring you back.”

Bruce turns his face into his pillow with a groan, blocking out the light from the window. It must be late morning now, the sun already high in the sky, shining over the red and gold of the trees across the lake. Clark simply laughs, tightening his arm around Bruce's waist. “I'm kidding. It was just the noises. I couldn't tell what you were dreaming about. Was it good?”

Bruce huffs a sigh into the pillow, wondering if it might be worth it to tell Clark that he has a strange desire to go down to the Cave to make sure that his upgraded armour is still in one piece.

“It was unrealistic,” he says at last. He rolls over, taking in the sight of Clark, bright-eyed and shirtless, and settles most of his weight on top of Clark's body. Clark takes his weight easily, arms curling loosely around Bruce’s waist. Bruce closes his eyes again, content just to relax in silence as Clark’s fingers glide over the curves of his back.

Then Clark shifts, pulling Bruce further up, and says knowingly, “Oh, it was _that_ kind of unrealistic.” 

Bruce considers kicking him out of bed. 

“Don't push it. You got in this morning?”

“I let myself in, yeah,” Clark confirms. “I only brought a couple of suitcases with me. I didn't know how much I'd need. The car’s out there if I need to go for anything else, I guess.” 

Bruce blinks at him. “The car?”

“I can still drive, you know,” Clark reminds him. “I just thought it would be better to keep it here if I'm going to be this close to the city.” 

He catches Bruce's eye, then presses a thigh between Bruce's legs, obviously expecting a reaction. Bruce hisses a sigh, ducking his head to hide behind his own arm. He’s tempted, but he's still struggling to wake up, and is more concerned about determining how long it must have taken Clark to drive east from Kansas than he is about Clark trying to unsubtly encourage him to rub against his leg. 

“You’re taking me up on my offer?”

“I thought that was obvious,” Clark teases gently. He combs his fingers through Bruce's hair, smile growing wider, almost shy as Bruce continues to hold his gaze. “If it's still okay with you.”

Bruce nods. He’d only asked Clark a couple of days ago about relocating, and even then it had been on a whim. A strategic move, certainly, and one that would benefit them both, but Bruce had only mentioned it once. Clearly, it hasn’t taken either of them much thought.

“I’ll have a key cut for you,” Bruce says. He doesn’t mention that he’d had one made weeks ago, just in case. Alfred still has it. He should probably let Alfred know the plan before he walks in on Clark in the bathroom, or in the kitchen, or in Bruce’s bedroom.

Clark hums, satisfied, then looks through the window. The leaves have started to turn, creating a rainbow of reds and golds and greens on the other side of the lake and all around the house. The weather is starting to cool with autumn upon them, the nights longer but still pleasantly warm. Inside the city, the trees in the parks are adding a much-needed vibrant splash of colour to the city blocks, allowing Gotham a brief but pleasant transition away from the green leaves of summer. Soon, winter will come again, and Gotham will go back to shades of white and grey and black. For now, Bruce admires the view with Clark. It’s always been his favourite time of year.

“So… you gonna tell me what you were dreaming about? Don’t tell me you don’t remember it.”

Bruce cocks an eyebrow, and the longer Clark grins at him, the more Bruce can feel his self-restraint starting to slip. Clark’s presence, too, has become a welcome change in Bruce’s life. Bruce feels more awake already with Clark around — though, more likely than not, it’s just the way Clark is starting to walk his fingers along Bruce’s spine, playful and suggestive, his enthusiasm an infectious thing.

Bruce remembers the phantom feeling of Clark kneeling in front of him, removing each plate of armour from his body with inhuman ease. It’s a shame that Clark had woken him, he thinks. It would have been nice to let Clark take him apart piece by piece. 

Clark watches him, and after a moment Bruce offers him a smile just as coy as Clark’s had been, dragging out the anticipation and delighting in every minute of Clark’s rapt attention.

“I’m thinking about making some upgrades to the Suit.”

**Author's Note:**

> One: I borrowed so much from the Arkham games for this (especially because the majority was written before details about BvS UE/SS came out. it's been a lot of fun.
> 
> two: this began as a red kryptonite fic, and it's definitely not about kryptonite now, but it definitely housed something Kryptonian. which us takes us to...
> 
> three: despite Bruce referring to the infection as an alien virus/parasite, it's actually a fungus! I wanted to make it analogous to the endoparasitoid Cordyceps fungus (if you're imagining The Last of Us, you're spot on). however, I took inspiration primarily from the [real-life version](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuKjBIBBAL8), which is even more nightmarish. (I also discovered that Clark was actually infected by a red Kryptonian fungus before, with similar unpleasant side effects. you learn something new every day, I guess.)
> 
> last but not least: a big thank you to the usual suspects: to Ashley, Myriah, and Shannon, who all got hyped about this with me (and who enjoyed BvS as much as I did), and to [brodinsons](http://archiveofourown.org/users/aeon_entwined/), who encouraged me to try my hand at writing for a new fandom.


End file.
